What's Behind the Urge to Write?

Recently, a friend wondered about whether to write a blog, and it got me thinking about writers' motives. George Orwell, in a well-known essay titled "Why I Write," laid out the "four great motives" of authors: sheer egotism (the desire to leave an individual mark), aesthetic enthusiasm (pleasure in the beauty of prose), historical impulse (to reveal the truth of the world as it is), and political purpose (to push the world in a certain direction). Orwell cited political purpose as his main motive for works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four. In contrast, Joan Didion, known for literary journalism in works such as The Year of Magical Thinking, cites an internal intellectual impluse: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." So why do I write? Well, Orwell's and Didion's motives may be involved, but, when it comes to fiction, I admit to being driven by an inner compulsion, an ultimately irresistible force of story and characters that demand release into words of pain, pleasure, fear and hope, words that are a revelation both surprising and familiar to me. Author Judy Blume has echoed this feeling: “Those of us who write do it because there are stories inside us burning to get out. Writing is essential to our well-being.” Yet the result is not just relief from the pressure of bottled ideas and feelings (author Anne Rice would call them "obsessions") but incomparable pleasure, which is perhaps my ultimate motive for writing. As Neil Gaiman, author of comic books and the award-winning fantasy novel American Gods, explains, writers "get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange." In this way, writers and artists share with prophets the special ecstasy of inspiration--whether it comes profanely from within or divinely from above. See what other famous authors say about motives for writing: http://flavorwire.com/303590/15-famous-authors-on-why-they-write

Book Clubs Often Give Short Stories Short Shrift

In an upcoming book club meeting, we are discussing the short-story collection Runaway by Canadian Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature as a "master of the contemporary short story." Despite the prestigious award, Munro wasn't an obvious choice. There is a hesitation in book groups to tackle a story collection; it's hard enough to structure a conversation about one plot and set of characters, much less multiple ones! That's a shame because some of our most iconic fiction is in short-story form. Consider the authors: Start with Chaucer and move on to O. Henry, Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, James Joyce, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger and Jorge Luis Borges, to name only a few. What about sci-fi giants Bradbury, Asimov and Clarke, icons of the eerie Stephen King and Shirley Jackson, or mystery masters Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie? There are hundreds of great writers of short-story gems. Some recent collections include Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, and John Updike's My Father's Tears and Other Stories. As Publishers Weekly said of Munro's Runaway stories of love, betrayal and time's surprises: "One never knows quite where a Munro story will end, only that it will leave an incandescent trail of psychological insight." But how to tap those insights in a single discussion? Short-story writers liken the process to appreciating an art gallery or rock album collection, meaning pieces appeal individually yet the collection is more than just the sum of its parts. Unique style and story-telling combine with recurring themes or characters to heighten the overall impact on readers. For book clubs who want to add a story collection to their roster, here's a general plan of attack from one author, and for Runaway in particular, BookBrowse offers a discussion guide at http://www.bookbrowse.com/reading_guides/detail/index.cfm/book_number/1495/Runaway