I was once told that I should court more discussion on my websites, that my writing should be controversial (for the sake of it) to encourage response from the readership. I wondered why. My websites are free, so I do not have to sell papers/to advertisers.
The reality is that while 'outraged of Tunbridge Wells' does still exist, many people are content to sit back, absorb content, comment to themselves or others, or sometimes even publicly, and move on. If we touch a chord or a nerve in our writing, then we are doing well.
Of course, we do not always write for others. The process can be very personal to us. This is perhaps why I don't much care whether people comment on what I write or not. It is lovely to have debate, engagement or acknowledgement, but I am not conceited enough to assume my articles are works of great art requiring intense debate, nor that people will have time/inclination to prioritise it in their lives. If they read it at all, that's good.
Where does Orwell Come In?
Why do we write? While there is no way I could ever be remotely on a par with George Orwell, he, in 1946, wrote an essay on the very subject of writing. Here's the gist of why he did it:
1. He grew up as an isolated and unpopular child, with a facility for words which he used to create his own private world. He also wrote to order - school work, etc. We all do some of that, if we write advertorial or copy for other people's sites. As a child, I also lived in my own dream world much of the time, editing magazines in my head, and writing copious notes. Writing also enabled me to stand out among the local children, to become something of a leader, teacher, instigator. As a child, it won me kudos, respect, friends.
2. By sixteen, he discovered the joy of words, sounds, associations. When reading becomes a pleasure, you are well on the way to this.
3. He also found he had a skill or talent at writing about unpleasant facts.
"I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development..."
Orwell then stated four motivations for writing prose:
1. 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-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.
2. 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.
3. Historical impulse.
Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4. Political purpose.
Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's 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.
These impulses, he felt, are in a constant state of war with each other, and vary according to time and place.
He added: 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.
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.
He added:
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.
What does this mean for us?
Anyone who is a prolific writer will have written some material they are very happy with, which courts controversy, tackling a subject close to us, in which we have a political interest in. The prolific writer will also have written bland stuff, based around other people's content, such as press releases, and simply getting information out there.
That's the difference between a job and writing for pleasure or because one feels compelled to. Does a journalist really wish to cover the local school fair? No. But they do so, anyway.
For me, and perhaps for you, that's the difficulty with doing most of the writing for your own websites. It is hard to be enthusiastic about much of life's mundane detail, yet it is the meat of life, and a form of community information for many people. It won't change anything, it won't set the world on fire, but it is helpful in its own way.
The truth is, we can never know how well or badly our work has been received. We can never know how much people have engaged with it, so Orwell, in not mentioning his audience is right.
Quality writing is very personal, it is very driven, and it is alive. To that extent, the audience is irrelevant, for it is the writer who has achieved a satisfying whole when it all comes together well.
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