On "Why I Write" By George Orwell

  I wish I had read Why I Write before I attempted to read any of Orwell's books, because as he said himself, we can not know a writer's intention without being familiar with his earlier work and his background in general.

  In this essay he answered a couple of questions that I had queried while reading his books.
One of which was his intention for the structure chosen for his books. In his own words :"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."

  An other question will surely be his motives to write and how he came to acquire them:"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 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."
   He also talks about his childhood habits, which most of us I think can relate to easily.
Also He listed the four motives that he believed drive each prose writer and are present in all but in different fractions. these four are:

 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.

 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. 

 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. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.