Why Writers Write
Why do writers write?
What are their motivations? What is the price they pay and what are the benefits?
Here are some answers by celebrated writers, philosophers and others:
In Hamlet, William Shakespeare wrote:
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote:
"Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius's crater for an inkstand....To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on a flea, though many there be that have tried it."
Novelist and essayist George Orwell wrote in 1947:
I think there are four great motives for writing....
(1) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc....
(2) Aesthetic enthusiasm...
(3) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(4) Political purpose -- using the word "political" in the widest posssible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
Every book is a failure.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
In a 1922 letter, writer Franz Kafka wrote:
"But what is it to be a writer? Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward, but its price? During the night, the answer was transparently clear to me: it is the reward for service to the devil. This descent to the dark powers...of which one no longer knows anything above ground....And what is devilish in it seems to me quite clear. It is the vanity and the craving for enjoyment, which is forever whrring around oneself or even around someone else...and enjoying it."
British political figure and novelist Benjamin Disraeli wrote:
"When I want to read a novel I write one."
In the controversial Tropic of Cancer, American writer Henry Miller wrote:
"If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush the miracle of personality."
French writer Andre Maurois in 1960 wrote:
"The need to express one's self in writing springs from a maladjustment of life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action."
Norman Mailer, one of the most outstanding and prolific fiction and non-fiction writers of the 20th Century, gave a very good reason for writing.
Mailer said he does not know what he thinks about something until he writes about it.
That means when he sees ideas on paper and some opposing each other he is able to gauge the strength of those thoughts and facts and form his own opinions in a way that he hopes makes sense to others as well as to himself.
In a letter, John Keats wrote:
"I have come to this resolution - never to write for the sake of writing or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge or experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me; otherwise I shall be dumb."
Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, wrote:
"Then arising with Aurora's light,
The Muse invoked, sit down to write;
Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline."
American Poet, essayist and Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
"Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book."
Writer and Nazi hunter Elie Wiesel in 1985 wrote:
"Why do I write? Perhaps in order not to go mad. Or, on the contrary, to touch the bottom of madness...
"Why do I write? To wrest those victims from oblivion. To help the dead vanquish death."
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: "Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood and thou wilt find that blood is spirit."
In a letter, William Wordsworth referred to poet Samuel Coleridge:
"Never forget what I believe was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
American editor and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the first issue of The Liberator:
"I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak or write, with moderation."
Arthur Trollope, who lived from 1815-1882, had some interesting remarks about writing:
"Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write."
"Of all the needs a book has the chief need is it be readable."
In a publication issued after his death in 1586, English writer Sir Phillip Sidney advised:
"'Fool,' said my muse to me. 'look in thy heart and write.'"
In a letter, French philosopher and writer Voltaire wrote:
"To hold a pen is to be at war."
