How Do You Know That You Are a Writer?

There are three answers to this question that I can think of as I write this post. First, you are a writer if you get paid to write. This covers the gamut of professional writers from authors, journalists and screen writers all the way to people who write laws, communications blurbs, and even greeting cards. We feel that if somebody gets paid to do something, then they deserve the respect (or disrespect) of carrying the mantel of the profession.

Second, you may be a writer because you say you are. Writer's workshops often encourage attendees to think of them self as a writer and even tell friends and relatives that they are a writer as a means of boosting their confidence. In this category there are writers who have never published anything but are struggling to be heard none the less. Recently, there was a lovely book on the bestseller list called Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owen. It was her only book and it wasn't published until she was 70. Was she not a writer until this book was published? Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960 and then nothing. She did publish another book called Go Set a Watchman in 2015 but that had been written in the 1950's before Mockingbird. Did she stop being a writer after Mockingbird? I don't think so. I think being a writer means a little more than just being paid to write, although getting paid is, in itself, an accomplishment.

Is it possible for someone to say "I get paid to write, but I am not really a writer"? I think this is entirely possible. There are endless people who get paid to do something, but do not identify with what they get paid for. There are teachers who hate teaching, lawyers who hate practicing law, plumbers who hate plumbing, cooks who hate cooking, and so on. Life drops us into a profession and we do it to survive. That does not mean it is our calling. So there must be more to being a writer than just getting paid to do it.

I will be retiring at the end of this month. I don't need to earn a living to survive. I can do anything I want. Well, maybe not anything. Eloping with Jennifer Aniston is probably not in the cards for me. But, fantasies aside, I have a lot of options. One way to think about whether your job is related to your calling is to ask if you won the sweepstakes tomorrow would you quit your job or keep on working. If you would quit, it is not your calling. If you would stay, it is, at least, one of your callings.

So, this brings us to the third answer. You may be a writer if writing is a core part of who you are. Bear with my indulgence as I lay out a few bits about myself. My Aunt Val was a freelance writer her entire career. She did ghost writing, editing, and some books under her own name. If you go on Amazon.com and type "Valerie Moolman" under books you can see some of the work she did. Not always glamorous, but it paid the bills. Her father, my grandfather ( or Oupa as they said in Afrikaans) was a newspaper man, later in press relations, later yet as a writer for the South African government translating legal work from English into Afrikaans or vise versa. So you could say there is some genetic component to my calling as a writer. However, that is tenuous as very few children of writers become successful writers in turn. So, there must be a bit more.

I did terrible in high school, not because I didn't write but because I didn't read, nor do homework, nor pay attention. There was no chance upon graduating from high school that I could go to college. So, I went to work for the government instead. The trauma of this exposure to the mundane snapped me out of my detachment and I attempted to redeem myself at a local community college. Oddly enough, I had to take two remedial courses in order to prepare myself for classes where I could accumulate real college credit. These two courses, five hours per semester each, were in English and Math. This is ironic as these were two areas that I would come to excel at later.

My first real class was a class in English Composition. I had to write a paper for the course and the teacher's comments praised the quality of my writing. Apparently, I had a gift of some sort. To say I was stunned does not quite cover it. The fact that I could do something that would be considered, by somebody who actually knew something, as having merit, was beyond my comprehension. I took the same instructor the next semester who commented on a paper that I did not achieve what I was capable of achieving. I did not reach the standard I had set in the previous semester. Wow! Not only did I have a gift, but I had a standard too!

This gave me confidence in not only my writing but in my academic work as well. I began to look forward to chances to write something and began being bolder in my writing which made it stand out more. Most of the time, although  not always, my efforts were recognized. But, I did not think of myself as a writer. I though of myself as a something else who had a gift that would help me pursue that something else whatever it may be. But, to be a writer, you have to be able to write something that others will see as something that could not have been written by just anybody.

While writing as a profession fell off of my radar screen for a couple of decades, I still wrote journals almost daily. I found that journal writing helped me organize my thoughts and get stuff that was rattling around in my head out of my head and on to paper where I could examine it. This is another thing about writers, not all, but many. We write because we have to write. My head fills up with ideas and the only way to clear my head is to write. Once I have written something, my head is clear and ready to fill up again. Lord Byron once said the he wrote to keep from going crazy. I know the feeling. In fact, I know it well. When I cleaned out my basement many years later, I tossed three or four dozen spiral notebooks that I had accumulated from my compulsive journal writing.

It wasn't until the late 1990's when I started to think seriously about creative writing. I had published several papers on the role of stories in computer ethics and realized that if this was going to go anywhere I had better learn how to write stories. I began writing short pieces and sending them out to colleagues asking what they thought. In hindsight, they probably thought I was nuts. But, I was determined and they were tolerant. In a "fish or cut bait" moment, I decide to commit to writing a full length detective story in serial fashion where I would sent out a chapter each week for comments. To sweeten the pot, I used several of my colleagues as characters in the story. I felt this would heighten there attention. It was a bit of a high wire act with no plot, characters that I know, and a weekly delivery schedule. But, it was a huge success. I found that the story wrote itself. They characters argued in my head about where the story should go. And I was largely just the scribe.

Several years later, motivated by my work in the role of stories in computer ethics, I decide to put it to the test again and see if I could teach students how to write stories that explore an ethical issue in computer technology. Following models of software design, I created a design process for stories and debugged the process in a creative writing class on writing stories to explore the ethics of technology. I taught this course for six or seven years and discovered a lot about the technical aspects of writing stories.

So, as I approached retirement, and thought about what I might do as an encore career, I thought that it might be fun to write. So, several years ago I began writing daily essays. I would start with a topic that I had no idea what to write about and start writing. Stuff appeared in my head and I wrote it down. How this works may be the topic of a future post. But, for now, I will say that I have collected four or five hundred of these essays. They may be selected and edited for a future book. Or they may simply serve as writing practice. I don't know what will happen, and I never do.

In fact, that is a good note to close on. I had no idea what I was going to write when I started this post. This final version is a first draft lightly edited. I have an active muse and I am her servant. I have gone on a bit too long here. But, that is not unusual for me. People often say that getting emails from me is like trying to drink from a fire hose. I understand. But, I cannot help it. I am, after all, a writer.