Can I Just Call Myself a Writer?
It's a rhetorical question; I don't actually need any outside input.
This is my first post here on Substack. By clicking the little “Continue” button at the top right corner of my screen, I will officially become a “blogger.”
What, then, is the criteria for being considered a “writer”?
I did not “write” this post. It was typed into the Substack publisher accessed via Google Chrome on a MacBook. No pens, pencils, quills, ink, graphite, or blood were used to form the letters of this piece of prose; therefore no physical act of “writing” was involved. This makes me “not a writer,” right?
Okay, that’s silly. The physical act of writing is not required to make one a “writer.” Everyone knows this.
So… what does?!?
A very select few can be considered “writers” in the professional sense. Authors, journalists, screenwriters, published academics, etc. get the luxury of having the certain credited title of “writer.” And yet, so many outside these professions consider themselves “writers.”
Without even taking into account instruction manual writers, copywriters, graduate students, and others who are financially compensated to write without credit, there is a swath of people who call themselves “writers” who do not make money by doing so. If we count screenwriters as “writers,” then we can count podcasters, YouTubers, and even TikTokers who produce original material as amateur “writers” as well, especially with the genres of audio journalism and “video essays” constantly growing these days. With that in mind, we can probably conclude that “writer” means something broader than someone who gets credited and paid to piece words together. Luckily for me (and I assume, many others here on Substack), amateurs who simply enjoy piecing words together can consider themselves writers. Enjoy your blogs and journals, writers!
Ah, but let’s muddy the waters even more.
We, as a society, considered the musician, Bob Dylan, a literary figure and “writer” when we gave him the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. I guess we’ll throw songwriter into that list of “writers” as well even though this profession typically involves rhythm, recording, and musicianship over piecing letters and words together in a grammatically consistent pattern. (And yes, I know he also wrote poetry outside of his more famous musical material, but let’s get real, that’s not what he won the Nobel Prize for.)
Long story short, words are funny.
At first glance, the word “writer” should be an easy word to imagine in our heads. Yet, it is much more complicated than that. We can’t trust “Modernist” ideals of firm definitions and capital-T “Truth” as much as we thought we could two hundred years ago.
The “truth” is that the “truth” is layered.
Great, so we should just give up, right? Should we just spiral downward into a postmodern hellscape where nothing means anything and anything means everything?
(Did I lose you on that one?)
Yeah, I don’t know. But I think I’ll call myself a writer.
Sue me.
Disclosure: This post was taken from a previous post of mine on Medium.