"Why am I writing this book?" sounds like a question for a quiet evening and a glass of something. It is actually the most practical question in the whole project, and skipping it is why so many drafts feel simultaneously overstuffed and unfinished.
Your motive decides who you are talking to, what you are allowed to leave out, and — the part nobody warns you about — how you will know the book is done. Writers who cannot name their motive tend to keep adding material, because nothing gives them permission to stop.
Orwell's four motives
In his 1946 essay Why I Write, George Orwell claimed that four motives exist in every writer, in different proportions, and that the proportions shift with the age and the atmosphere a writer lives in. It remains the most useful taxonomy anyone has produced, mostly because it refuses to be flattering.
Sheer egoism
To seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death. Orwell listed it first and insisted it was not a small factor — and that pretending otherwise is humbug.
Aesthetic enthusiasm
Pleasure in the rhythm of a good sentence, in the shape of a story, in the arrangement of one word beside another. The wish to share an experience you consider valuable.
Historical impulse
The desire to see things as they are, find out true facts and store them up for posterity. The impulse behind testimony, biography and most serious nonfiction.
Political purpose
Using the word in the widest sense: the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society they should strive after.
"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery."
Four writers, four different answers
Orwell's categories are a map. These are four writers standing on very different parts of it — and each answer implies a different way of working.
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means."
Writing as discovery rather than transmission. If this is your motive, you cannot outline in detail — the book has to be drafted to be known, and the structure arrives in revision. Planning too hard will kill the thing you came for.
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
Writing to disturb. This motive sets a hard standard for cutting: any chapter that merely informs, comforts or confirms is failing the brief, however well written it is.
"You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't."
Political purpose, held without illusion. It implies a reader who disagrees with you, which changes everything: you must anticipate objections, and contempt for that reader is a technical error as much as a moral one.
And a fourth, which is really a duty rather than a desire. Primo Levi wrote If This Is a Man out of the need to bear witness — to set down what happened so that it could not be denied. Testimony is the strictest motive of all, because accuracy outranks beauty, and a fine sentence that bends a fact has destroyed the point of the book.
What each motive actually changes
This is the part that makes the question practical rather than decorative. Find your row and notice how much it decides for you.
| Motive | Structure it wants | What you cut | How you know it is finished |
|---|---|---|---|
| To persuade | Claim, objection, evidence | Anything a sceptic would skip | Every serious objection has been answered |
| To bear witness | Chronological, restrained | Ornament, speculation, revenge | The record is complete and accurate |
| To understand | Exploratory, found in revision | Conclusions you had before you started | You have changed your own mind on the page |
| To make something beautiful | Whatever the material demands | Anything merely useful | Nothing can be removed without damage |
| To teach | Whole first, then parts | What the reader does not yet need | A real beginner can follow it unaided |
| To be read and remembered | Whatever holds attention | Every slow passage, however dear | Nobody who starts it puts it down |
Most books have a primary motive and a secondary one, and that is fine. What is not fine is a book with two primary motives pulling in different directions — the testimony that also wants to be a thriller, the argument that also wants to be a memoir. Readers cannot feel the conflict, but they feel its symptom: a book that never quite lands.
Three questions that find your real motive
The answer you would give at a party is rarely the true one. These three get underneath it. Write the answers down; do not merely think them.
1. If this book were published under someone else's name and read by thousands, would you still want to have written it?
A yes points to purpose, testimony or craft. A no points to recognition — which is a legitimate motive, and one worth knowing about, because it changes what you should be writing and how you should publish it.
2. What would make you say afterwards that it had failed?
Poor sales? Nobody understanding it? One specific person not being convinced? Your definition of failure is the most honest description of what you were trying to do.
3. Which chapter would you fight hardest to keep?
Imagine an editor demanding a 30% cut. The section you defend is the book's centre of gravity — and if it is not the section you have been calling the centre, your plan is pointed at the wrong thing.
Once you have the answer, write it at the top of your plan in a single line, and re-read it whenever the draft starts sprawling. Related: how to plan a book, and the four decisions that come before the first sentence.
Write the motive at the top of the book
A purpose kept in your head drifts. A purpose kept in the first page of the project decides every cut you make for the next year.
A plan page inside the book
Motive, reader and promise sit at the top of the same tree as the chapters.
Structure you can change
When the motive sharpens, reorder the book to match it in one drag.
Version history
Cut the chapters that serve the wrong purpose without losing them for good.
Everything in one place
Notes, research and draft together, on web, desktop and phone.
Questions about writing and motive
Why do people write books? +
Orwell's four motives still cover most of it: egoism, aesthetic pleasure, the historical impulse to record things as they were, and political purpose in the broadest sense. Individual writers add others — to understand their own thinking, to bear witness, to teach. What matters is knowing which is dominant in your case, because it determines your structure, your cuts and your ending.
Does it matter if I write for money or fame? +
Not morally, but practically it matters a great deal. If reach is your real motive, then genre, length, title and publication route are core decisions rather than afterthoughts, and a beautiful book nobody finds is a failure by your own standard. The damage comes from denying the motive, not from having it: you then make choices that quietly serve it while telling yourself a different story.
What if I do not know why I am writing my book? +
Write 10,000 words and then ask again. Motives are often clearer in retrospect than in prospect, and Didion's answer — writing to find out what she thought — is a legitimate starting position. The danger is not starting without a motive; it is finishing without one, because nothing ever tells you the book is done.
Can a book have more than one purpose? +
Yes, in a hierarchy. One primary motive and one or two secondary ones works well and describes most good books. Two primary motives pulling different ways does not: the testimony that also wants to thrill, or the argument that also wants to be a memoir, produces a book readers describe as nearly working without being able to say why.
How does knowing my motive help me finish? +
It supplies the stopping condition. A book written to teach is finished when a beginner can follow it; a book written to persuade is finished when the serious objections are answered. Without that test, every additional chapter feels potentially necessary, which is exactly how manuscripts swell past 150,000 words and quietly die.
Answer the question in one line
Then put that line at the top of your book, where you will see it on the days the draft starts sprawling.
Start writing free