Why I write … and why maybe you should too

“If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.” - Kurt Vonnegut

Fellow literature nerds will know that just by naming this piece “Why I Write,” I am inviting myself to a seat at a celebrity table. Famously, George Orwell and Joan Didion have published essays of the same title, in 1946 and 1976 respectively, describing their personal writing philosophies and their compulsions to put pen to paper, and offering an intriguing look inside the minds of both acclaimed writers.

While you may not be familiar with these essays, or George Orwell and Joan Didion in general, discovering their “Why I Write” pieces proved to be a pivotal moment in my younger years. As a kid who grew up scribbling down thoughts in random spiral bound notebooks — rooted in the effort to capture how certain moments felt in addition to what they looked and sounded like, to create motion out of static words, to create a sense of preservation of perspective — the discovery of Orwell’s and Didion’s self-examinations, written as poetically as their narrative pieces, was groundbreaking.

For the time being, I’ll offer a brief overview to save you the trouble of running off to read them, though I do recommend you eventually take a look. George Orwell’s “Why I Write” highlights moments from his childhood that made him realize he’d forever be compelled to write, even as he fought the urge for much of his early adulthood. He breaks his reasoning down into four clear reasons: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. He notes how these reasons “exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time,” but he explains these as the general principles that motivate writing.

Meanwhile, in Joan Didion’s “Why I Write,” which she openly professes as an ode to Orwell’s, Didion leaves her reasoning more open-ended and emotive. She explains how she knew she was a writer when she was always paying attention to the periphery — the way leaves fell from the tree out the window, the smell of the Greyhound bus on her daily commute, the way certain streetlights became sinister in the evening — rather than strictly focusing on ideas. Famously, Didion framed it as, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”

Although these essays may speak to me in particular due to my personal predilection for pen and paper, reading them for the first time struck a deeper chord within me, outside of personal like or dislike. The essays capture, and poignantly describe, the universality of writing — taking it down from its often academic pedestal and putting it on the ground as an everyday method of making sense of everyday life.

These essays emphasize the commonality of the urge to tell a story — to feel important, to immortalize a memory, to make something beautiful — and illustrate how this desire stems from the same place inside of all of us. Whether we’re sitting at a big oak desk in an office in New York City or hunched in a beanbag chair in a college dorm, the desire to write, and what we can get out of it, remains the same.

But do people actually write? Do college students in particular take the time to write for writing's sake, rather than to continue spinning on the assignment wheel? And is it worth it to take the time in our busy days to slow down and write journal entries, silly poems or lists from the day?