Why do writers write?

This blog was going to be an easy one to write, or so it seemed. All we had to do was to Google ‘why I write’, collect the answers given by a clutch of famous writers, past and present, and edit them into an entertaining colloquium.

In the event, it was very difficult to find nice straightforward answers to this question, at least not without listening to long podcasts and reading articles hidden behind paywalls. The exception was George Orwell, who wrote a book called Why I Write, which provided hundreds and hundreds of unnecessary hits for our Google search.

Instead, what emerged was that for very many writers it is axiomatic that they were always going to write and that they have to do it. Take Virginia Woolf. She actually stopped writing when quite young because her doctor and her father persuaded her that it was bad for her nervous condition and that she should do gardening instead. Eventually Vita Sackville-West persuaded her to go back to writing. Or take Enid Blyton. Writing was her best academic subject, so she went in for Arthur Mee’s children’s poetry competition; Mee not only offered to print her verse but also asked for more. Her mother thought it was a waste of time, but a friend persuaded her to go on with it, and the accident of working in a stately home, reputed to be haunted, kickstarted her well-known children’s adventures.

Philip Pullman, asked ‘When did you first start writing stories as a child?’, answered ‘I think I wrote my first story at the age of eight or nine. I like to think I’ve learned a little since then, but really it’s the same process.’ Dorothy Sayers wrote ‘Man [sic] is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.’ Whether we would agree with such a sweeping statement, it is clearly how she saw herself as a writer. J. K. Rowling is almost more extreme: 

The truth is that I can’t separate a ‘writing life’ from ‘life’. It’s more of a need than a love. I suppose I must spend most of my conscious life in fictional worlds, which some people may find sad, as though there must be something lacking in my external life. There really isn’t!

Similarly, Francine Rivers knew she wanted to be a writer from a young age. She became very successful with her historical novels, starting in 1976. After becoming a Christian, she suffered from writer’s block. She realized that writing had become an idol, and paradoxically, when she stopped caring whether she ever wrote again, the block disappeared. She heard a call to retell the story of Hosea, which resulted in her highly successful book, Redeeming Love.

Susan Howatch trod a similar path: having been a successful writer of gothic novels, she experienced spiritual emptiness. After a ‘spiritual epiphany’, she concluded that she should continue to write novels, but should ‘set forth my discoveries in the light of faith, no matter how feeble and inadequate my beginner’s faith was.’ This led to her successful series of Starbridge novels.

C.S. Lewis wrote his Narnia books partly because he wanted to write stories of the kind that he liked to read, but also because he needed to write them, and according to Rowan Williams this was probably an urge to express themes that he was already writing about in his adult works in terms that children could understand. He had no qualms about writing books ‘with their Christianity latent’, as he put it, even though he was told that this was ‘jesuitical’.

Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien agreed with him about creating the kinds of story which he liked reading, of which there were not enough. He might not have gone along with Lewis’s idea of ‘books with their Christianity latent’. For him The Lord of the Rings was a thoroughly Catholic work: in other words its Christianity was patent rather than latent. But as John Garth has shown, Tolkien’s works are also a response to the experience of the Great War. And when illness deprived him of the ability to write he described it as like a hen deprived of her beak: a sign that writing was totally in the blood.

Wikipedia says of H. G. Wells, that ‘During his own lifetime, … he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale.’ Something started him off as a writer, but once writing, it was the desire to see social justice that drove him on. Much the same might be said of Charles Dickens, of course!

Which brings us back to Orwell. In Why I Write he enunciates that same early, powerful sense of calling — without any explanation of its cause — which we have seen in our other writers:

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

In the same book, Orwell lists ‘four great motives for writing’ that exist in every writer in different proportions at different times.

1. Egoism. This sounds worse than it is, for though it encompasses such things as getting talked about or getting your own back, it also includes being remembered after your death, which can certainly include the desire to make a difference.
2. Having aesthetic pleasure in the look and sound of good writing. He says that this motive is ‘very feeble in a lot of writers’!
3. The historical impulse, the desire to find out the facts and preserve them for the good of humanity.
4. Political purpose. This again might sound off-putting, but it is not the narrow impulse it might seem to be. As with Tolkien, it was war — in his case the Spanish Civil War — that was the defining event that shaped Orwell’s purposes. But ‘political’ really means something wider: the ‘desire to push the world in a certain direction’, which is as much what we see in C. S. Lewis and Francine Rivers as in H. G. Wells, Dickens, and Orwell himself.

Very tellingly, Orwell concludes his essay: ‘It is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.’ In just the same way, we cannot separate the compelling narratives of Lewis, Tolkien, or Rivers from the purpose — the desire to push the world in a certain direction — that motivated them.

Edmund and Clare Weiner