George Orwell and Joan Didion

            
            
             George Orwell and Joan Didion explain their objectives in their essays both of which are titled "Why I Write." George Orwell wrote his in 1946 and Didion in 1976. She openly admits that she, "stole that title from George Orwell," and in saying so she clearly acknowledges the similarities in both her and Orwell's writing styles. Both writers portray a desire to write only matter-of-factly, and avoid abstract ideas, and in doing so, they try to allow their style or, "prose style," to come alive. The two share a, "pleasure in scraps of useless information," as George Orwell puts it.
             Didion and Orwell also share a topic in which they write, politics. Didion although had explicitly rejected writing about politics in 1977, but as her writing progressed she began to publish books regarding the topic, including After Henry (1992), and Political Fictions (2001). George Orwell states that, "what [he has] most wanted to do is to make political writing into art," which resembles Didion's idea of having a picture in her mind telling her, "how to arrange the words." These two statements are similar in that they reveal the writers" desire to have the work be, "an esthetic experience," as Orwell believes, rather than an abstract one. .
             Didion most certainly sees writing as a form of imposing your opinion on someone, as she explained that it is, "an aggressive, even hostile act an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space." Orwell seems to reveal this sense of hostility in his writing when saying that in order to write he must start with, "a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice," enabling him to make his writing, "downright propaganda," which can be associated to Didion's idea of writing as, "an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.".
             Orwell and Didion reflect an aspiration to make all their writing into art, no matter what the subject may be, and although the writing subject may bring forth, "lifeless books," as Orwell puts it, it in itself becomes a piece of art.