Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

by Sarah Stodola

he headed out into the field to gather new ones. He posed as one of the vagrants of East London, which provided him with material that proved important in that it was grippingly dramatic and dealt with the downtrodden. He’d sometimes go undercover in the slums for a few weeks at a time, and it was this experience that finally freed him of the clichés and contrivances he’d been struggling with up until then.203 He found he could write about this experience with clarity and from a singular perspective. It brought him to the breakthrough he’d been waiting for, along with the onset of the direct, unembellished prose style that would characterize his writing going forward, like in this passage from Down and Out: It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, [sic] is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. Such prose ultimately became synonymous with the name Orwell.