George Orwell — Why I Write.

I’m currently reading Orwell’s Essays (as recommended to me by a few of you) and it struck me that the first in the collection, Why I Write, might interest those not already familiar with it. Some interesting points I’ll comment on when I have more time.

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.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i.e. seriously intended — writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ — a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d’occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost —

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature — taking your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl’s bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. 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 experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. ‘Why did you put in all that stuff?’ he said. ‘You’ve turned what might have been a good book into journalism.’ What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. 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 nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that 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.

Stephen King on Duma Key.

I found the final sentence of this piece very reassuring…

A Brief Post Concerning Writing Targets.

I think it’s fair to say that for the past six months or so I’ve felt more consistently well than I have in a good while (*looks around for some wood to touch*). As a consequence, I’ve been able to raise my monthly writing target to around 20,000 words — and, it seems, meet it.Today I hit 18,000 words, with a few working days left in the month, and I’m really beginning to feel that I can keep this up for the full novel. It feels good and it got me thinking about writing targets and how vital they are to me. A few things occurred to me that might help new writers out there.

1. It’s important to set targets that are realistic, but which stretch you a little. Five hundred words a month might be considered “realistic”, but at that rate it’ll take you something like ten years to write a short novel. Not good if you’re serious about getting published.
2. Flexibility should be built into any routine you establish. Targets are there to be hit, but if your dog dies, a day off is permissible. Don’t turn into Jack Torrance in The Shining (that’s my job, Wendy!)
3. Writing a 50,000 word novel in a month once a year because some website says you should is possibly a bad way of becoming a writer, for a number of reasons: a) 50,000 words isn’t a full-length novel. It just isn’t; b) For most people, 50,000 words in a month just isn’t a realistic target; and c) You should be aiming to write a little every day (or most days) of the year. That’s the most effective way of developing a voice. Crazy bursts of creativity might work later, once you really feel comfortable with your craft. Until then, steady as she goes.
4. Enjoy! If you don’t enjoy writing, try this

John Irving on the Writer’s Craft.

The older I get, the more problems I have with my one-time writing hero, John Irving — especially with the tendency towards excess in his writing. Nonetheless, he has an impressive ability and I still value what he has to say on the subject.

Take a look:

Saturday — At Rest.

I always make it a rule not to work on my current project, whatever it may be, at the weekend. With my particular attitude to work (i.e. occasionally a little towards the obsessive end of the scale), it’s always a good idea to set some time aside for not working. So Saturdays and Sundays are for other things and, as you might expect, it’s a rule I rarely stick to.

Today, however, I did — spending most of the afternoon wallowing (yes, that feels about right) in Don’t You Have Time to Think, the collected letters of Richard P. Feynman. Touching (especially in the letter he wrote to his first wife, a while after she died), funny and insightful, it’s classic Feynman and I’d recommend it to fans and Feynman newbies alike.

Returning to the subject of Children of the Resolution (yes, I know, on a Saturday, too), I’ve been flip-flopping somewhat on the question of whether or not to post the opening on this ‘ere blog o’ mine. I’m not quite ready for detailed crits, at this stage. I prefer that once the first draft is done; too much “incoming” can seriously damage my idea of what I want the novel to be. That said, a general opinion of whether the novel works on the whole (for a rough first draft) can be useful.

Now that I have 14,000 words behind me, I’m feeling more “settled” — and so, before I change my mind, again…

Prologue.

Chapter One.

Chapter Two.

Any detailed comments you feel like making, please hold back until I ask for them. The question I’m largely concerned with having answered at this stage is: Bearing in mind it’s a first draft, am I largely on the right track?

Right… I have emails to write, but they may have to wait. My eyes are about done in. (If I owe you an email — Jean, Jane, Steven, Louise, Becky…. etc.! — I haven’t forgotten. ‘Onest )

The Mind of a Child.

I’m a little disturbed by just how easy I’m finding it to write from the viewpoint of a six-year-old. I’d expected sleepless nights, much unsatisfying rewriting and handfuls of ibuprofen just to keep the headaches at bay. Not so. It’s actually proving to be a liberating and refreshing experience — the challenge of communicating a child’s strange (but, ultimately, oddly understandable) logic without going overboard lending my writing a degree of vitality that I haven’t felt for a while.

I suspect I’m going to come away from this with a renewed respect for children.

Now, where did I put my Space Dust?

Irreligion.

I haven’t actually had chance to read this particular book, yet (will probably wait for the paperback), but it is definitely going on “the list”.

——————————

Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up

by John Allen Paulos

From: RichardDawkins.net.This little book just arrived on December 26th, and I must have missed it in the Christmas shuffle.  

A Lifelong Unbeliever Finds No Reason to Change His Mind

Are there any logical reasons to believe in God? Mathematician and bestselling author John Allen Paulos thinks not. In Irreligion he presents the case for his own worldview, organizing his book into twelve chapters that refute the twelve arguments most often put forward for believing in God’s existence. The latter arguments, Paulos relates in his characteristically lighthearted style, “range from what might be called golden oldies to those with a more contemporary beat. On the playlist are the firstcause argument, the argument from design, the ontological argument, arguments from faith and biblical codes, the argument from the anthropic principle, the moral universality argument, and others.” Interspersed among his twelve counterarguments are remarks on a variety of irreligious themes, ranging from the nature of miracles and creationist probability to cognitive illusions and prudential wagers. Special attention is paid to topics, arguments, and questions that spring from his incredulity “not only about religion but also about others’ credulity.” Despite the strong influence of his day job, Paulos says, there isn’t a single mathematical formula in the book

“John Allen Paulos has done us all a great service. Irreligion is an elegant and timely response to the manifold ignorance that still goes by the name of ‘faith’ in the twenty-first century.”- Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation 

“He’s done it again. John Allen Paulos has written a charming book that takes you on a journey of flawless logic, with simple and clear examples drawn from math, science, and pop culture. At the end, Paulos has left you with plenty to think about, whether you are religious, irreligious, or anything inbetween.”- Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History, and author of Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries 

“For years John Allen Paulos has been our guide for reading newspapers, playing the stock market, and understanding what all those graphs and charts and formulas really mean. No one knows how to dissect an argument better than Paulos. Now he has turned his rapier wit to the grandest question of them all: Is there a God? Those who are religious skeptics will find in Paulos’s analysis new ways of looking at both old and new arguments, and those who believe that God’s existence can be proven through science, reason, and logic will have to answer to this mathematician’s penetrating analysis.”- Michael Shermer, author of How We Believe, The Science of Good and Evil, and Why Darwin Matters

The Benefit of Limitless Energy.

Today I was forced to take a break from my literary endeavours when I woke this morning feeling more exhausted than I’d felt upon retiring the night before. An annoyance, given that I wanted to get on with chapter two, but I have to be sensible; I have rather less energy than most (an effect of my disability), and 7,000 words in a little over a week isn’t bad going. I therefore gave myself the advice I’ve given other writers in the past; writing a novel is a marathon, not a sprint. We none of us have limitless energy. Use what you have wisely.

On the subject of The Children of the Resolution, I’m toying with possibly posting the prologue and chapter one on this blog. I don’t want to do this, however, if no one is interested in reading it (it makes me look terribly unpopular if prospective publishers drop by .) Given that it’s only twenty double-spaced pages, would you be interested in reading and sharing your honest opinion (good or bad)?

Shame on You, Hitch.

I suppose it should come as no real surprise that we are all of us, at times, susceptible to the odd bout of silliness. Anyone who hasn’t said or written something stupid in their time, let’s face it, probably hasn’t said or written a whole lot. We all occasionally miss the mark. Some more than others, admittedly, but even the best of us are fallible

So I write this post with that in mind — wondering if, perhaps, we expect a little too much of our fellow human beings and, in particular, if I’m being a little ungenerous when I point out that Mr. Christopher Hitchens has been a prat

Now, I don’t always agree with Old Hitch, but I do admire his bulldozing ways and his intellectual acuity. Even when I disagree with him vehemently, I usually maintain my admiration for him

Not so with this piece of silliness. Now an American citizen, it seems that Christopher (I call him that when he’s been a bad boy) has decided that the best application of his journalistic ability is the silly reinforcement of silly stereotypical representations  of the British. There’s no denying, we have and are proud of (to a point) our eccentrics and eccentricities. It’s a reflection of our love of independence and geography. I can accept his leg-pulling in that regard (even though 99.9% of us are far from eccentric.) What I find offensive about this piece (though I must admit, I won’t exactly be losing sleep over it) is the suggestion that we all like animals more than people (and, he implies, children in particular) and the sheer inaccuracy of the general picture he paints.

Silly — and clearly intended as a bit of fun, which I’m not averse to. The fact remains, however, it was lazy, clichéd, and so obviously pandering to American misapprehensions that it does no one any favours

Christopher, they won’t get the joke. They’ll believe it. Shame on you.

What I’m Reading.

Yesterday, I started what promises to be a fascinating and entertaing read — H.L. Mencken’s On Religion. An acerbically witty journalist, magazine editor and critic of American culture during the early- to mid-1900s, he was a reporter on the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial” and an avowed atheist.

At times jarringly politically incorrect by today’s smothering standards, I’m looking forward to settling down and reading the rest of it.