This guest post from author Thomas E. Kennedy is the first of four, each focusing on a question that has empowered him - and could also empower you - as a writer.
Q: When do you become a writer?
Thomas E. Kennedy: When you’re starting out and have published little, maybe nothing at all yet, it is hard to believe in yourself as a writer. Back when I’d only published two or three stories, although I had been at it for years, when someone asked me what I did, I felt funny claiming to be a writer.
Did I really have to identify myself with the day job that paid my bills even though I considered writing the most important thing I did?
I asked a former teacher, Gordon Weaver, whose resumé included a dozen books of fiction, at what point he felt comfortable saying he was a writer. His answer empowered me.
He said, "A writer is someone who writes. A serious writer is someone for whom writing is the most serious activity he or she knows. The amount of publication, money, fame you might get – these are extra-literary factors."
With those words at my back, I began to call myself a writer.
How do you feel about calling yourself a writer?
Thomas E. Kennedy is the author of eight novels, as well as several collections of short stories and essays. He teaches creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
In the Company of Angels, published by Bloomsbury in June 2010, is one of four novels comprising the Copenhagen Quartet. It is the first of Kennedy’s books to be published in the UK.
Click to visit the official website of Thomas E. Kennedy »
One isn't a writer simply because they send holiday cards every year to their friends and relatives although I'll admit, some of those people do write very well. When we seek to do it to create works in writing fields; that's when I believe the writer title is applicable. Incidentally Sanjev, isn't that the Narayan who translated the Ramayana? It was one of the books my father used to read it to me as a child.
I am a writer, it is the be all and end all of my life, it is my raison d'etre, it is the innermost workings of my soul, almost everything I write comes from personal experience of one kind or another.
I may never become a published writer although I have certainly posted almost everything I have ever written on forums that I am a member of, but that is of no matter to me, I could no more stop writing, than stop breathing, my work writes itself, my hands are simply the medium by which it is able to put the words on the computer.
If I never published any of my work it would not make me any less a writer
I agree that we are all writers in the sense that we create our own world but we need to put things down on paper...
Write if it makes you feel good and call yourself a writer if you want to. There's nothing wrong with that.