Why should I provide my email address?

Start saving money today with our FREE daily newsletter packed with the best FREE and bargain Kindle book deals. We will never share your email address!
Sign Up Now!

Publetariat Dispatch: George Orwell On His Own Writing

Publetariat: For People Who Publish!
In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, author Alan Baxter shares some of what George Orwell had to say about writing and writers.

I think we should file this one under ‘B’ for Bitter old Bastard. George Orwell had this to say, about his own writing:

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.

 

 

I can’t say I agree with all of  that, not by a long way. But it does provide some interesting food for  thought. I came across the quote on Cat Sparks’ Facebook wall and I  think Margo Lanagan summed it up best in her comment:

Second half is halfway sensible; first half—well, wasn’t HE a drama queen.

 

Yes.  Yes, he really was. Writing a book really is hard work, and you often  question your sanity in the process. But it’s bloody brilliant too.  Nothing horrible about it. Of course, our real underlying prime  motivators for writing are obscure. Most of us may never really know  exactly why we do it, other than that we simply can’t not do it.

Anyway,  as I said, an interesting quote and it’s given me pause for thought. If  nothing else, there’s one line in there that’s absolute gold:

Good prose is like a windowpane.

Meditate on that one, Grasshopper.

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

 

Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap