In the middle of her essay, Didion says, ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means’ (Didion). For George Orwell, the main reason he writes is to emphasize a situation in which many people ignore or simply are not fully informed, to be able to express his point of view, and to make people interested in what they don’t know. In the center of the essay, Orwell states, ‘I write it because there is some lie that I want to draw attention and my initial concern is to get a hearing’ (Orwell 6). It is obviously that Orwell and Didion share the same thought of why to write, but each one has a different answer or thought. There are several reasons why men and women decide to put their thoughts on paper and make them stories. Orwell and Didion both share their experience in their writings, but a more in-depth examination reveals several substantial differences such as their reason for why their write, what motivates them to write and what is their purpose.
But that they share the same title doesn’t mean that they think or write in the same way. Orwell argues that many people write simply to feel clever, to "be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups in childhood, etc." He says that this is a great motive, although most of humanity is not "acutely selfish", and that this motive exists mainly in younger writers.Thirty years after Orwell, Joan Didion, a respected essayist, wrote her essay ‘Why I Write,’ which is the same title as Orwell. Now I know that that Orwell lists in the essay “Why I Write” four motives for writing, which exist in different degrees in every writer, He explains that all are present, but in different proportions, and also that these proportions vary from time to time and which I am going to speak about.įirst of them, I would like to speak about the motive called sheer egoism. It offers a type of mini-biography as he writes of having first completed poems and trying his hand at short-stories before finally becoming a full-fledged writer, but also examines the motivation of writing itself through the four reasons for writing.ĭuring the seminar we also established that “Why I write” shows author`s way of becoming a writer, influences on his way of writing, and conditions that made him a writer. Noted as a novelist and critic as well as a political and cultural commentator, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the 20th century.Īn essay “Why I Write” was written in 1946 and it is detailing Orwell`s personal journey to becoming a writer. In that essay I am going to speak about the seminar on the George Orwell`s essay “Why I write”.Įric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist.
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