Don’t Call Yourself a Writer

I hear it all the time. ‘All you have to do to be a writer, is write.’

Well… yeah. But there’s a difference between a person who writes and being a writer, isn’t there? You can be both, and you can hop from one to the other, but to mistake the two is surely a disservice to writers who deal with the constant self-doubt and endless bouts of drafting.

A person who writes can do so without the impostor syndrome that comes from labelling themselves a ‘writer’. They aren’t chasing anything, they’re just having fun. They might get published someday and adopt the title of writer, but for now they’re a different, lighter animal.

A writer’s natural habitat is the centre of a thousand scraps of loose paper, pouring cement words into deep plot holes, and constantly doubting if they’re doing the right thing. I think writers are a lot more insecure than we give them credit for. If they were more confident, they’d be in the room and telling you the story, not handing you a piece of paper and murmuring ‘enjoy’ with various forms of social media marketing.

But this is just my opinion. What makes the difference between a writer and a person who writes? …It’s up to you to decide.

I remember the change hit me like a ton of bricks when I was choosing universities: I knew life would be easier if I studied a ‘hard’ subject like maths or physics, and I had the talent to do so- but I’d already started falling in love with English Literature, and I’d been having intense affairs with poetry since high school. I forced myself to go to all the open days, to visit the science and mathematics departments, shoving English tours to the back of every weekend schedule… but I felt the truth in my guts every time I crossed the threshold of a Literature lecture, like a nerdy vampire being invited in for the first time.

I was seventeen, and just under 130 pounds. I didn’t have a lot of guts to be listening to, so when they piped up I thought I’d better listen. I came close to tears when I came out to my parents as a future English student, even though they immediately accepted me and said ‘it’s okay, we’re still proud of you.’

Still, studying literature and creative writing was not enough to make me a writer in my own eyes, even as others gave me the label. For me, I had to be published first… and I was! I was published five times before I hit my 20th birthday. But I still thought, ‘None of these places are big enough. I’m not a real writer until I’ve written a book.’

So, I wrote my first book age 20, in my last year of university. I wrote the whole thing in five months, during the Coronavirus pandemic. Was I a writer yet?

Hell no, it has to be published before I can be a writer.

The pandemic had most of my friends ghosting each other, trying to sort our own lives out. I saw this as a disappointment, but also an opportunity. I got to know other people-who-write on social media, looked at writers Instagrams- real writers who’d really been published, for real, and I realised:

Nobody is a writer. Not by their own standards. Every time you hit the thing that’s going to make you a writer, there’s another step added to the ladder. The label of ‘Writer’ stays above you, unreachable.

Or is it?

I have an exercise that I repeat with myself whenever the writerly pastime of self-loathing hits.

I write the word ‘WRITER’ in big funky letters on a piece of paper, and make a spider diagram, a word bubble of things that go into making a ‘real writer’. If you were not a writer or even a person-who-writes, what would you say? Be honest.

Often, the same things come up. Writers:

• Write
• Read
• Listen to criticism
• Hoard stationary
• Get insecure/ imposter syndrome
• Seek publication
• Don’t have to be published

Wait, what was that last one?

• Don’t have to be published

Don’t look at me, you wrote that with your own hands.

When we do these kinds of exercises, we often surprise ourselves with what comes out. In a creative writing class, we were asked to think about labels and our identities, and to write down every worth that came to mind. I filled an entire page of things I think about myself, things other people think about me, things you might think just from spotting me in the street, etc.

Every label is a piece of me, but not all of them are big and important. You don’t have to be published to call yourself a writer. Sometimes, you can just give yourself a label when you need it, when you need reminding who you are.