HABITUAL PURPOSES AND MOTIVES FOR WRITING

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It is important to have knowledge of the purposes and motives of why a person writes, both in his own and intimate manner and by traditional commercial and lucrative forms, since the practitioner of this WALK-RWD system could reorient his intentions and aspirations. I have already commented on the writing WHY AND WHAT TO WRITE FOR? that in the first instance, writing allows us to express ourselves and that would be a sufficient purpose, since it leads us to express our feelings and thoughts more sincerely, without any other objective.

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For this reason, and although it is not the intention of this blog to channel efforts through commercial and lucrative scenarios, I allow myself, in a brief way, to describe these different purposes and motives, for those who wish to venture along those paths of the writing. Before that, I would like to define the words “purpose” and “motive”, because between them there is a thin line that separates them into their meanings. Purpose, according to dictionaries, is “Intention to do something, purpose or objective that is intended to be achieved”; while motive, is “cause or reason that determines the realization of a thing”.

Thus, the traditional “purposes” of why to write are, succinctly, the following:

1. Explain and describe. The meaning, value or symbolism of anything, how it works or develops in space and time, why it happens. Why something fails.

2. Persuade. To do anything, to be created in some situation, opinion or idea, or action, to do something. To convince others about personal ideas about something or some situation or ideology, to convince about certain personal judgments about a book, food, images, impressions, affections, etc. To persuade them to enroll in a course, vote for someone for an administrative or political position, or buy a product or service that is being advertised.

3. Inform. About the content of something. On a subject, fact, data, sensations, emotions, pains, feelings, people, events and news of general interest.

4. Investigate. About some ideas, opinions, questions; to examine how much your ideas and those of other individuals have changed about a particular issue; to ask questions that do not have simple answers; and thus share your thoughts, criteria and results, by reflecting on your writings and findings, with other people.

5. Share. Communicate your ideas, thoughts, reflections, judgments, reasoning, advice, warnings, concerns, meditations, speculations, about the important issues and topics that you have been working on and that become clearer in our minds as you write them.

6. Entertain and have fun. These activities of entertaining teaching and fun communicating can be developed as a primary and unique purpose; however, they can also be carried out in a shared way, that is, combined with the other 5 previous purposes, in addition to being used to induce readers on any topic considered important, doing so with humor, joviality and an agile and creative language.

7. Know ourselves better. By writing we let our unconscious out and that way we are more sincere in what we feel and in what we think.

Perhaps an activity that we could point out as a common denominator in the previous 7 purposes, is to teach, with its synonyms and derivations: educate, guide, document and instruct.

Now, on the “motives” of why it is written, we could well resort to what some writers have expressed, such as George Orwell, at the time mentioned that, leaving aside the need to make a living, “I think that there are 4 great motives to write, at least to write prose. They exist in varying degrees in each writer, and specifically in each of them the proportions vary from time to time, depending on the environment in which you live. These are the motives:

1. Acute selfishness. Desire to appear clever, to talk about one, to be remembered after death, to recover from the elders who despised one in childhood, etc., etc. It is a falsehood to pretend that this is not a very important motive. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, military, highly successful businessmen, that is, with the top layer of humanity. The great mass of human beings is not intensely selfish. After thirty years of age, they abandon individual ambition -many almost even lose the impression of being individuals and live primarily for others, or simply drown them in work. But, there is also the minority of the well-endowed, the volunteers determined to live their own lives until the end, and the writers belong to this class. Serious writers, who tend to be more vain and selfish than journalists, should be said, although less interested in money.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world or, on the other hand, in words and their right combination. 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 that one believes valuable and should not be missed. The aesthetic motive is very weak in many writers, but even a pamphleteer or the author of textbooks will have pampered words and phrases that will appeal to him for non-utilitarian motives; or it can give special importance to typography, width of margins, etc. No book that is above the level of a railroad guide will be completely free of aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical momentum. Desire to see things as they are to find the true facts and store them for posterity.

4. Political purpose, and I use the word ‘political’ in the broadest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter the idea that others have about the kind of society they should strive to achieve. I insist that no book is free of political nuance. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is already a political attitude in itself. -And he ends by saying: I write because there is a lie that I want to expose… I see that I have made it appear that my motives in writing have been inspired only by the public spirit. I don’t want to let that impression be the last. All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there is a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible and exhausting struggle, like a long and painful disease”. So far Orwell’s words about why I write?

It remains in us, to validate each of all the purposes and motives that have been mentioned, in this and in other posts. The important thing is that we want to walk simultaneously with the activities of reading, writing and drawing, when we feel the urge to do so.

Sooner or later we will realize what our purposes and motives for writing, were as we walked.

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