What is a Writer?

It's a question that didn't bother me until I started thinking about publishing and the ever-elusive goal of success. When I was younger, I understood that a writer wrote and that's all there was to it. With time, I came to understand that most people distinguished "real" writers from the flock by publication. As the modern age made print media niche, the standard for "true" writers became more elusive. Suddenly, it wasn't enough to be published. Writers had to be traditionally published or sell more than some unknown quantity of books. You could be a hack, just as long as you were a successful hack. Of course, that discourse got muddied by the success of E L James and Lani Sarem but those are tangents for another time. The truth is that in the age of streamers and influencers the entire concept of success and career isn't so black and white anymore and no one's really sure what it means to be a writer anymore.

That is unless you're on twitter's writing community. There is an established response to the question: "If you write, you're a writer. Period." While others are willing to ponder the question seriously, the vast majority of people will respond to this issue in this manner: everyone who writes is a writer, there are no requirements to classify yourself as such.

Except this doesn't agree with my journey as a writer. It took me a long time to consider myself a writer. As soon as two years back, I would introduce myself as anything but a writer. I'd rather call myself an unemployed bum than a writer because at least then, they couldn't have the satisfaction of knocking me down a peg. But I did consider myself a writer two years ago, I just didn't think that I was successful enough to call myself a writer. I was prepared for arguments about "but are you really a writer?" "What have you written?" "How many books have you sold?" Because I'd been there and had no interest in engaging with that discourse.

So, I get it. I can understand why writers would want to say that all writers are writers because we get a lot of push back from people who have no idea what kind of dedication and focus it takes to put words down. But to say that I was a writer the second I wrote my first word doesn't feel right. It feels like a safe answer that ignores the spirit of the question. What is a writer? Or put another way, when does someone who writes become a writer?

Most writers don't start their journey sitting down at the keyboard or in front of a pad of paper and think to themselves, "I'm a writer now," and commit this declaration to truth with a dramatic first word. We don't know if we're a writer at the start because we don't know what it means to write. How do you commit to a lifetime of isolation, futile research, and rewriting the same basic idea nine times without knowing what that experience is like? Yes, writing usually comes from a desire to breathe your story into life but it's more than dancing with the muses.

Writing is a skill that requires hard work and dedication to improve. It isn't copying the techniques of things you read or improving on the stories you consumed. Writing requires you to find your own voice, to develop aspects of storytelling that you disregarded or thought useless, and to improve yourself. Well, at least that's what the writer's journey has been for me, so when I hear people say, "you're a writer from the first word," it disregards all the effort, experimentation, and failures you make before you finally find that groove, enter flow, and forget you exist if even for a single moment. Because I for one didn't feel like a writer when I started, I felt like I was doodling with words.

But trying to quantify what it takes to be writer falls flat. Writing is an art form. It can be used for business, or catharsis, or to change the world. People aren't going to have the same metric for success. Even trying to limit the analysis to written accomplishments proves faulty. Those who want to be a pop writer might say that you don't really get a rhythm until your fifth book but there are critically and financially successful authors who spend ten years to write a single book. Sometimes a first novel is a debut novel and those authors know nothing about the pain of querying again and again for years without ever seeing a single request for more material.

I've been uncomfortable with the idea that a writer simply isn't. But I think that was because my approach was so goal-oriented and pragmatic. When I think about my journey and the journey of so many other writers, they didn't start out thinking they were a writer, they came to identify themselves as a writer with time and experience. They knew what it took to keep writing and committed to that life. From this perspective, only the writer can know when they've made that crucial step. The only person who knows if they are a writer is the person who writes. They know if they have the desire and dedication to be a writer.

To butcher twitter user Grace Willows' words, the drive is what turns a person who writes into a writer.

This works really well for me. Regardless of whether a person is writing to get rich or lessen hate crimes, they need that drive to finish draft after draft after draft without giving in. For me, I didn't feel like a writer until I rolled up my sleeves and learned how to stick to a writing schedule. And I honestly don't think I deserved to be called a writer before that, because I didn't have the drive to get it done.

This brings us back around to the popular response on twitter's writing community: you're a writer the second you write. Grammatically, sure, but let's try not to be pedantic. I think a large part of why this is the goto reply for twitter's writing community, is because they don't want to step on any toes. There's this prevailing fear that a bad review or a harsh critique can make a writer quit but I fundamentally disagree.

I've quit writing four times in my life. Each time I quit, I thought I wouldn't be going back to that alluring and punishing blank page. But I kept coming back because I had stories that I wanted to tell. I didn't care that my grammar was abhorrent. I didn't care if my ideas were cliche. I didn't care that people thought my characters were expressions of my darkest thoughts. I loved my stories more than I feared the backlash. Eventually, the inspiration would wear off, the doubt would come back, and only when I had the drive to work on my shortcomings did I become a better writer. Only when I stuck to my work and learned to ignore contradictory notes did I finally start writing for me.

If someone stops writing forever because of one bad review or one bad comment, then they didn't have the drive to be a writer. Writers don't quit when they get bad feedback. They lick their wounds and go back to that manuscript to find where they went wrong. Writers don't give up because they're not people who write, they are something more.