My first essay for Scene4 Magazine appeared in November
2013. “Why George Orwell is One of My Heroes” served as a way of introducing myself to my readers; the title alone made it clear it doubled as a manifesto. In Orwell’s essay “Why I Write,” a gem published in the summer of 1946, he explores four reasons he hammered away at his Remington typewriter: Sheer egoism; Aesthetic enthusiasm; Historical impulse; Political purpose. His concise explanation (just eight entertaining pages in my paperback edition) captures just about all the motivations a writer could have.

Orwell points out that most writing combines several of these impulses. A measure of ego always applies: you gotta have a little hutzpah to think you have something to say. That you’d want to say it well also seems a given; as Orwell quips: “Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.” For Orwell, though, the strongest reason to write was that last category, political purpose. He states with the matter-of-fact conviction of a man assured in his calling:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

My monthly offerings as a columnist and Senior Writer have also blended Orwell’s four reasons to write. It occurs to me, though, especially as a poet, that there’s another impulse: the ability of writing, both its composition and consumption, to make familiar things new again and, often, more interesting than previously considered.

In his famous essay, “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley writes: “ Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar . . . ” That insight will be echoed over 100 years later. In his poem “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” Wallace Stevens writes these lines: “Yet I am the necessary angel of the earth, / Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.” The “necessary angel” to which Stevens refers is, of course, the poet, but prose writers can achieve similar magic — to make us see the world as if for the first time or the first time that way, at that angle, through that lens, in that context.

Writing about people and things I love—my friend Pete Chambers who’s gone, my pal Jamie Wagner who thrives; a perfect album by Billy Squier or Dire Straits; the poetry of Thomas Hardy or Friedrich Hölderlin; the films of Takeshi Kitano; scaling mountains, visiting vineyards—has enabled me to see and hear and feel them again and anew. I hope that I’ve enabled my readers from time to time to do the same.

Writing has the power to transform and renew. It’s a little mysterious, actually, but chalk it up to cognition: writing is its own unique way of thinking. When you engage in the activity of composing your thoughts in order that others may read them, you arrive at places you’d never reach by merely mulling things over. When you begin writing a poem or an essay, you may have a very clear notion as to how you want the piece to proceed, but unforeseen ideas will arise like trailheads branching off in a forest. Even fact-checking or verifying the spelling of a name can lead to unexpected insights or surprising connections. Expository concision acts like a geological force, compressing the loose dust of reflections into diamonds of exactitude.

Unless you’re some kind of savant, writing is not taking dictation. The Muse may generously grant a portion of the work—a few lyrical lines of a poem, a page or two of prose never besmirched by an editor’s blue pencil—but the rest is on the writer to generate, from an overarching schema right down to the granular level of diction. Phrases are weighed, condensed or expanded, whole expository strategies adopted or abandoned, asides entertained or discarded.

The value of writing naturally leads to the value of reading. The insights, connections, and rare epiphanies culled by great writers sit there on the page, ready for harvest. Reading them initiates a virtuous cycle: consuming well-written literature informs one’s own writing. Famously, Irish poet Seamus Heaney dug with his pen, but you can also see with it. Again.