Writer

• 1. Introduction

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  A writer is a person who shapes the world one word at a time, and the range of what that can mean is staggering. George Orwell took the pen name Eric Blair and asked a deceptively simple question in 1946: "Why I Write." The answers, he suggested, involve some mixture of self-expression, the recording of facts, and the desire to influence the world. What does it actually take to be a writer, and what kinds of people have called themselves one? Why have so many of them been punished, imprisoned, or even executed? And what compels a person to keep writing after losing their only manuscript to a fire? This documentary explores the many shapes that writing takes, the surprising forces that drive writers, and the price some have paid for putting words on a page.

• 2. The Forms Writing Takes

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  Playwright Mike Bartlett wrote King Charles III in 2014 in iambic pentameter, the same verse form Shakespeare used centuries earlier. That choice alone signals something important: the forms available to writers are ancient, varied, and endlessly adaptable. A novelist, a lyricist, a speechwriter, a technical writer preparing a user manual, and a blogger posting on the World Wide Web since the 1990s are all writers, yet their work differs in almost every respect.

  Poets push language hardest, using rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and assonance to create effects that operate simultaneously on the senses, the emotions, and the intellect. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has been made into at least eight cinematic versions and performed in theaters without interruption for centuries. In the United Kingdom, a Poet Laureate is appointed to be the official poet to the Monarch and the government, upon the advice of the Prime Minister. Scotland maintains its own equivalent position, called the Makar. Carol Ann Duffy, whose work explores love and feminism, was appointed as UK Poet Laureate despite being Scottish.

  Librettists occupy a distinct corner of writing, producing texts for operas and other musical works. The Venetian poet Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote libretti for some of Mozart's greatest operas. Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa wrote for Giacomo Puccini. Richard Wagner was an exception to the norm of collaboration, writing both the music and the libretti for his works himself.

  Satirists have their own tradition. Jonathan Swift wrote the four-volume Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal, among many other satires. Philosopher Voltaire's satire Candide, which targeted optimism, was later turned into an opera. Barry Humphries, described as a contemporary satirist, writes comic satire for his character Dame Edna Everage to perform on stage.

  Screenwriters face a particular pressure: they may write an entire script with no advance payment, no contract, and no guarantee anyone will read it. This practice is called writing speculatively. Many are later hired to adapt the work of playwrights or novelists, working as freelancers paid by contract. Teleplay writer Joe Menosky adapted the device of a "play within a play," first used in Shakespeare's Hamlet, for an episode of the science fiction series Star Trek: Voyager.

• 3. Interpreters and Analysts

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  Richard Ellmann, who lived from 1918 to 1987, spent his career writing about the Irish writers James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Oscar Wilde. His biography of Wilde won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Ellmann represents a category of writer whose medium is not imagination but analysis: the biographer, the critic, the editor, the lexicographer.

  Critics bring a distinct discipline to writing. A good critic, as the source puts it, understands and is able to incorporate the theory behind the work they are evaluating into their assessment. The art critic Charles Baudelaire, who lived from 1821 to 1867, and the literary critic James Wood, born in 1965, have both had collections of their criticism published as books.

  Lexicographers build dictionaries, and the most famous is Samuel Johnson, who lived from 1709 to 1784. His Dictionary of the English Language was considered so authoritative that it would have been consulted by writers such as Jane Austen.

  Encyclopaedists gather and organize knowledge at scale. Denis Diderot, who lived from 1713 to 1784, is renowned for his contributions to the Encyclopedie. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who lived from 1499 to 1590, created a vast encyclopedia of Mesoamerican civilization that is now commonly called the Florentine Codex, named for the Italian library that holds the best-preserved copy.

  Translators work at the intersection of languages and cultures, seeking equivalents for meaning, intention, and style. Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ibn Matar translated Euclid's Elements from Greek into Arabic. Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and published the first translation of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs in 1822. Sometimes translation is nearly impossible: the title of Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes has been called untranslatable because, as one assessment puts it, no English adjective can convey all the shades of meaning contained in the French word "grand" as the story progresses.

• 4. Writers Who Document the World

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  Florence Nightingale, who lived from 1820 to 1910, wrote a report that filled more than eight hundred closely printed pages, drawing on her experience in the Crimean War. It laid down principles of far-reaching reform covering military, statistical, sanitary, and architectural matters, and became for a long time the leading authority on the medical administration of armies. Nightingale is one example of a writer whose purpose was not art but documented change.

  Diarists record the texture of daily life in ways that prove irreplaceable. Samuel Pepys, an English administrator and Member of Parliament who lived from 1633 to 1703, kept a detailed private diary that provides eyewitness accounts of events including the Great Fire of London. Anne Frank, a Dutch girl who lived from 1929 to 1945, began her diary at age thirteen. From 1942 to 1944 she recorded both her experience as a persecuted Jew during World War II and the ordinary pressures of adolescent life.

  Blogs, which appeared on the World Wide Web in the 1990s, extended diary-keeping into an entirely new form. Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani education activist, rose to prominence through her blog for the BBC. The technology allows writers to link to other sites, meaning a blogger and their writing can become suddenly and unpredictably popular. It has been argued that the blog owes a debt to the Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais were published in 1580, because Montaigne wrote as if chatting to friends.

  Report writers shape decisions in boardrooms, courtrooms, and parliaments. The logs and reports of Master Mariner William Bligh contributed to his being honourably acquitted at a court-martial. Bob Woodward is named as a journalist who investigated and wrote about criminal activities by a US President. Investigative journalism, in particular, carries personal risk: the Balibo Five, a group of Australian television journalists, were killed in 1975 while attempting to report on Indonesian incursions into Portuguese Timor.

• 5. Why Writers Write

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  George Orwell's 1946 essay "Why I Write" is perhaps the most direct attempt by a writer to account for their own compulsion. Success or failure for a writer has been described as "a complicated business, where the material rubs up against the spiritual, and psychology plays a big part."

  Anger has driven some of the most consequential writing in history. Martin Luther, furious at religious corruption, wrote the Ninety-five Theses in 1517. Emile Zola, who lived from 1840 to 1902, wrote the public letter J'Accuse in 1898 to bring attention to a government injustice. The consequences were severe: Zola had to flee to England from France.

  Financial necessity has pushed others to write when nothing else would serve. Frances Trollope began writing to save her family from financial ruin at a time when there were very few socially acceptable employment opportunities for women. Her book about her experiences in the United States, Domestic Manners of the Americans, became a great success, even though she was over fifty and had never written before. According to her writer son Anthony Trollope, her books saved the family from ruin.

  Aristotle, who was tutor to Alexander the Great, wrote two treatises for the young prince: On Monarchy, and On Colonies. His dialogues appear to have been written either as lecture notes or discussion papers for his philosophy school at the Athens Lyceum between 334 and 323 BC. J. R. R. Tolkien, described as a philologist, created an entirely new language for his fantasy books. Payment is only one motivation, and many writers are never paid for their work at all.

• 6. The Price of Writing

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  William Tyndale was executed around 1536 for translating the Bible into English. Sima Qian, who lived roughly from 145 or 135 BC to 86 BC, defended a vilified master from defamatory charges and was given the choice between castration or execution. He became a eunuch and buried his own book to protect it from the authorities. Galileo Galilei, who lived from 1564 to 1642, was sentenced to imprisonment for heresy after writing in support of heliocentrism, though that sentence was quickly commuted to house arrest.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lived from 1906 to 1945, wrote The Cost of Discipleship and was hanged for his resistance to Nazism. Antonio Gramsci, who lived from 1891 to 1937, wrote political theory and criticism and was imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who lived from 1918 to 2008, used his experience of imprisonment as the subject matter for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward, the latter of which had to gain the approval of the USSR Union of Writers before it could be published legally in the Soviet Union.

  Salman Rushdie, born in 1947, published The Satanic Verses, which was banned and burned internationally. A fatwah was issued against him, and though he survived, numerous others were killed in incidents connected to the novel. Roberto Saviano, born in 1979, wrote a bestselling book called Gomorrah about organized crime in Naples, which provoked the Neapolitan Camorra and led to him receiving permanent police protection.

  The organisation Reporters Without Borders, also known by its French name Reporters Sans Frontieres, was set up specifically to help protect writers and advocate on their behalf. Professional guilds and unions now represent writers in dozens of countries, from Australia and Great Britain to Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Philippines, Sudan, and Ukraine. In the United States, both a writers guild and a National Writers Union exist. Boris Pasternak, the Russian writer who lived from 1890 to 1960, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, only to decline it under pressure from his government.

• 7. Working Alone and Together

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  Angus Wilson wrote for a number of hours every morning. Somerset Maugham reportedly wrote facing a blank wall. Goethe, at least by his own account, could not write a line if another person was anywhere in the same house. Most writers work alone, struggling with both the ideas they are trying to express and the best words for expressing them.

  Writer's block is a relatively common experience among professional writers: a period when they feel unable to write for reasons other than lack of skill or commitment. L. L. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, had years of work thrown into the fire by his father, who feared his son would be thought a spy working in code. Essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle lost the only copy of his manuscript for The French Revolution: A History when a maid mistakenly threw it into the fire. He wrote the entire book again from the beginning.

  Collaboration has produced some of the most enduring writing in history. The partnership of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan is among the best known: Gilbert wrote the words for the comic operas that the two created together. The translation of the Bible into English, sponsored by King James VI of England in 1604, was assigned to six committees working at locations in Cambridge and Oxford, each allocated different sections of the text. The resulting Authorized King James Version, published in 1611, has been described as an "everlasting miracle" because its translators sought to balance accessibility and beauty, plainness and richness, simplicity and majesty.

  Crowdsourcing writing has its own history. The Oxford English Dictionary was built under the editorship of lexicographer James Murray, who relied heavily on the prolific contributions of W. C. Minor, at the time an inmate of a hospital for the criminally insane. William Blake is named as one of the rare poets who created his own paintings and drawings as integral parts of his works, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience.