George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm), from his essay “Why I Write“:

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in ­– at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.

He posits four often shifting motivations for writing:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful business men – 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 abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, 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.

I am sometimes asked about how/why to start writing. I think writing is great (as a hobby, practice, therapy, creative outlet, whatever). The biggest hurdle to starting writing for others as a habit is that, in many cases, the dominant motivation is egoism. And we should be okay acknowledging that, but the problem is that, odds are, when you write, no one is going to read and no one is going to care, at least for a while. There’s no guarantee of ever achieving any sort of external validation. When the ego isn’t fed, the writer can lose steam. Most blogs are abandoned within 6 months or so.

I would add a layer to Orwell’s point. Sometimes the ego can also be a matter of internal validation. To challenge yourself to make something and to actually make it. And that form of egoism (i.e. “I can do hard things”) doesn’t rely on external validation.

(ii) 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. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

Yes.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Also yes.

(iv) Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

I would also add a rhyming layer here, and that would be: writing to learn how you think. Sometimes the desire is not just to convince others but first to convince yourself.

Four of my favorite passages from Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee:

The approach to structure in factual writing is like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with. If something is red and globular, you don’t call it a tomato if it’s a bell pepper.

Another mantra, which I still write in chalk on the blackboard, is “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” It’s actually a quote from Cary Grant. Its implication is that few (if any) details are individually essential, while the details collectively are absolutely essential.

So much good writing is rooted in real, personally-filtered human experience.

“How can you afford to use so much time and go into so many things in such detail with just one writer when this whole enterprise is yours to keep together?” He said, “It takes as long as it takes.” As a writing teacher, I have repeated that statement to two generations of students. If they are writers, they will never forget it.

That part is hard.

No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.

You develop yourself by writing.

My son asked me last night about writing in the era of ChatGPT. In short, I told him yes, I think it really still matters.

2024 was a busy year for me (as all years feel busy, just as I suspect they do for literally everyone). Here on the site I did more quote-and-commentary posts and short asides, which I find enjoyable to write and share but also help me cover emotionally for fewer longer or more involved postings amidst the vagaries of life and also all the radiology job-related stuff I won’t shut up about. Every site like this has its seasons, and not every season results in the same frequency, length, or even writing quality (depending on the content, current events, and my shifting interests over time). That is the usually happy nature of a writing hobby instead of a writing job. That said, I’ve wanted to do another longer project for several years, and I naively thought 2024 was going to be the year that happened. It didn’t.

This year I would like to practice finishing, which is one of life’s most satisfying skills. I’m going to start that by finishing, polishing, and publishing a whole bunch of half-written drafts that I have accumulated over the past year. Even then, I have so many that will never see the light of day (especially those that were topical at one time but probably no longer helpful or insightful). I doubt any of these will blow any minds, but I hope some will be helpful for those smaller number of readers that will stumble upon them at the right time of their lives. Some are about medicine including radiology practice, radiology learning, and radiology training, but some are just derived from interesting things I’ve read over the past year or two that I’ve wanted to share. I’ll never, ever clean out my writing backlog, but I’d like to share some work over the coming months that I will define as complete in the sense that I’ve pressed publish.

I’ve tried to take heart from the overarching lesson of Four Thousand Weeks: this doesn’t matter. That doesn’t mean none of this is worth doing to me or has no value, but rather that—on a cosmic scale—there’s no reason to take myself too seriously. There are a few things I want to do this year writing-wise just because I (theoretically) can, so I think I will.

Regarding the future of writing (and thinking) in an AI-enabled world, from “Writes and Write-Nots” by Paul Graham:

The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can’t write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can’t write, there will just be good writers and people who can’t write.

A very short essay, well worth the 2 minute read.

With improving AI tools, the progressive ease of information acquisition and low-effort good-enough “work” generation may be good for lots of things, but for actually internalizing the skills of deliberation, argumentation, and communication? Probably not so much.