Why Do You Write?
For me, it’s got a lot to do with digging
Lord Byron said, ‘If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad’.
For Byron, it was a psychological necessity to put pen, or quill, to paper in order to exorcise the ever-proliferating denizens of his mind; an eviction notice to all thoughts that they must go out into the world to fend for themselves.
Zadie Smith says that ‘writing is my way of expressing — and thereby eliminating — all the various ways we can be wrongheaded’.
Again, a process of removal, not like some wild and everlasting crusade against insufferable house guests, but rather, a calculated and considered slow whittling away of the layers of ignorance and imprecision. Note also the ‘we’ — the person has taken on something more common, more universal.
George Orwell comports with this sense of the social and the need to upend the wrongness of the world: ‘My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article if it were not also an aesthetic…
