Several years ago I was asked to write something about why I write. At the time, my response wasn’t particularly enlightening, being a somewhat self-important riff on my inner need to connect with the world. As if I had some sort of monopoly on wanting to make a dent on an indifferent universe or leave something besides bone fragments to posterity.
Many famous writers have been asked this question and responded in their own individual ways, often giving an insight into the creative process behind works that in many cases have been gifts to posterity. It’s a question that bears asking because writing is, as I’ve mentioned before, a demanding and arduous occupation, one that exposes the writer to merciless criticism, callous rejection and most soul-destroying of all, total indifference. It’s one where the rewards are nebulous, never guaranteed and in the case of some projects may be years away, if they materialise at all.
With this question in mind, I recently read Joan Didion’s essay, “Why I Write“, published in the December 5th 1976 edition of The New York Times, in which she starts out by saying she stole the title from George Orwell.
Orwell’s title appealed to her, she says, because she liked the sound of the words “Why I Write”. “There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound … and the sound they share is this …I, I, I”, a defining theme for the act of writing, which she sees as totally self-centred, self-serving, even belligerent. Writing, she says “… is an aggressive, even a hostile act …setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space”. This could be dismissed as Didion turning her characteristically acerbic gaze on herself instead of one of her subjects. But it uncannily prefigures sentiments expressed by another writer (one who shares a certain affinity with Didion).
Janet Malcolm begins her seminal book “The Journalist and the Murderer” by saying “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible”. Didion of course was a journalist too, a standard-bearer for “New Journalism”, defined by Norman Mailer as “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience.”
Whether and how the character of the narrator can be judged by the story they write is a question that belongs in the realm of professional ethics, that grey area where lots of empty signifiers are tossed around like balls in the hands of inexpert jugglers. Journalists and writers of any description may argue that the story trumps all and apart from blatant sins like plagiarism, any and every other strategy employed towards its end, is justifiable.
Didion apparently thought so. In her 1967 essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” her account of the so-called “Summer of Love” the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out cultural revolution that sprang up in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco in the summer of that year, she relates being taken to meet a five year old girl, a kindergarten student “wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book … wearing white lipstick”, who she is told is “high on acid”, fed to her for the last year by her mother. In 2017 Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne recalled this incident in his self-produced 2017 documentary, “Joan Didion: the Center Will Not Hold”, and in answer to being asked what this was like, Didion replies “Well, it was … let me tell you, it was gold. You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.” The scene, not surprisingly, was subsequently given a great deal of press coverage. Rebecca Mead in “The New Yorker” interprets her response as demonstrating Didion’s “mastery of the journalist’s necessary mental and emotional bifurcation”. Don’t get involved, in other words. Not so much a “morally indefensible” attitude as an occupational hazard.
Jen Webb, in an article published in “The Conversation” called “Ethics and Writing” says “words do more than simply name the things for which they stand … words can construct a context that readers will feel, see, hear, smell. Words …can bridge the divide between the abstraction of language, and the concreteness of the material world; can make things …real.” In making things real, writing surely must be the opposite of “artificial” and “disinterested”. Good writing in any context cannot be just about what happened, it must also be about how it felt. In an article published in Vogue’s November 2014 edition called “Why Joan Didion Matters”, Nathan Heller wrote “the ultimate standard for great writing is not clarity or intelligence or entertainment. It’s the capacity to haunt: to get under the reader’s skin and stay there …”. It’s a high bar but in writing, like many things, to aspire is the secret – the reach must always exceed the grasp.
New Journalism hadn’t been invented when George Orwell wrote his version of “Why I Write”, although he tended to conform to its principles, particularly the use of dramatic literary techniques and “enormously personalised” reporting. In his fairly starchy essay Orwell lists as the factors that motivate him “sheer egoism”, “aesthetic vision”, “historical impulse” and “political purpose”.
His honesty in admitting to the first is refreshing, particularly as it’s at the top of his list. Not too many writers would be so candid. To suggest every writer dreams of public acclaim and wealth would be presumptuous, but as Orwell writes, “it is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a big one”. I’m not sure about big, but it plays its part. I’m not alone I’m sure in having entertained fantasies of which big name Hollywood star I’d choose to play my protagonist in the smash hit movie version of my book. And the lure of literary prizes and awards will never lose its lustre. But the extent to which these kinds of fantasies work as motivation is debatable, especially when they’re such pipe dreams.
Nevertheless, all writers need dreams, the humblest of which is to be read – a need that’s up there with Maslow’s Hierarchy. This need is non-negotiable. Every word, every sentence, every page painfully gouged out of our innermost darkness, is done in the expectation that it will be read. It doesn’t matter if what we write is applauded or condemned (although we’d prefer the former), but the thought of it being ignored is anathema. If this is, as Orwell would have it, “sheer egoism” or an indication that writers are part of “the whole top crust of humanity”, one wonders what the middle and lower crusts care about.
Orwell’s confessional opens with an interesting declaration.
“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.”
It’s not uncommon for writers to claim writing as their destiny or to suggest that they were born with an inner compulsion to write, almost as if it’s a genetic factor in their makeup. For example:
Toni Morrison is quoted as saying “I knew I always was compelled to do it, but I didn’t know how essential it was to me …”
In her fascinating book “Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do” Meredith Maran quotes several writers who were motivated similarly to Orwell. It was in their blood.
Sara Gruen says “I knew I wanted to be a writer as soon as I knew how to read, and I began by making little illustrated books. At age seven, I sent one to a publisher.
Ann Patchett says “From the time I was a little child, I knew that writing was going to be my life. I never wavered from it.
Gish Jen says “Writing is part and parcel of how I am in the world. Eating, sleeping, writing: they all go together. I don’t think about why I’m writing any more than I think about why I’m breathing.”
Jorge Luis Borges is quoted as saying “Before I ever wrote a single line, I knew in some mysterious and therefore unequivocal way, that I was destined for literature. What I didn’t realize at first is that besides being destined to be a reader, I was also destined to be a writer.”
And then there are the writers who claim writing is a psychic, even physical compulsion. For example:
David Baldacci says “If writing were illegal, I’d be in prison. I can’t not write.”
Isabel Allende tells the author “I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor and I have to deal with it sooner or later”.
Jodi Picoult says “I write because I can’t not write.
Jennifer Egan says “When I’m not writing I feel an awareness that something’s missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There’s something vital that’s not happening. A certain slow damage starts to occur. I can coast along awhile without it, but then my limbs go numb. Something bad is happening to me, and I know it. The longer I wait, the harder it is to start again.”
And on a website called “Writers Write”, Lord Byron is quoted as saying “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
When I revisit this question myself, it feels self-important to claim an inner compulsion or suggest writing was my destiny. It smacks of claiming to be “special” or possessed of a “gift” which if left cerebrally unopened festers and throbs until torn into and revealed to the world (in all its questionable brilliance). But there is something that urges me on. Rather like Jennifer Egan (in a very loose analogy), if I don’t write I feel bad. For example, soon after I stopped working on the novel, I found I missed writing to the point where writing nothing became untenable. I felt irrationally guilty. Why this is I don’t know. Joan Didion in her version of “Why I Write”, described a writer as “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper”. Substitute a white screen for paper, and that describes me. More crafty than arty. Perhaps it’s a form of basket weaving, weaving words instead of canes. Or origami, folding phrases instead of paper, occupational therapy to help me become a calmer, less neurotic person. Whatever writing is, it’s undeniably self-indulgent, even narcissistic. I sometimes feel all I’m doing is filling the blank space with solipsistic rambling in the imaginary presence of a reader, reaching out an ethereal hand across the void in the hope it will touch someone who won’t think “tell someone who cares”.
The last word perhaps should go to Orwell who put it well. “All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. 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 or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention”.
