Stumbled on George Orwell's magnificent essay "Why I Write" recently. Hadn't read it in years, and it's something that every writer should take a look at every once in a while.
"...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."
So with that in mind, here's this from 1984...
"To be a minority of one doesn't make one mad..." Sidestepping the potential double-speak there, I shall embrace this thought as I struggle onward.
Comments
Very smart man.