WRITERS DO IT FOR MORE THAN MONEY.
It was George Orwell who best pointed out that hope of making money is seldom the main reason why pople write. In his opinion, far more of them seem to write just to get even.
In his essay, Why I Write, Orwell emunerated what he called the writer's four great motives. First on his list was -- "Sheer egoism; desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grownups who snubbed you in childhood, etcetera."
He concluded "It is sheer humbug to pretend that this is not a writer's 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." 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."
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." 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."
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