Who is a writer?

Roy Peter Clark

It may seem like a simple question that should have  a simple answer. A writer is someone who writes. But is a plumber someone who fixes a leaky faucet? Is a nurse anyone who puts an adhesive bandage on somebody's finger?

Twice in recent weeks I have come across discussions of this very question in my reading. Roy Peter Clark, writing in Murder Your Darlings, leans toward the anyone-can-be-a-plumber side. "If you write, you are a writer," he says.

In her tips for writers at the end of The Space Between Us, Thrity Umrigar says something similar but with her own twist: "The difference between writers and non-writers is just that writers write. Non-writers talk about wanting to write."

The narrator of Andrew Wilson's novel The Lying Tongue is a man who travels to Venice to write a novel, then decides to become a biographer. He is one of those people who likes to talk about being a writer, but in truth writes almost nothing. As Umrigar suggests, there are many such people. Toward the end of his life, Truman Capote became this kind of person. He liked to talk about being a writer, but he had stopped actually writing.

Surely one does not have to be published or even to make money from writing to be a writer. An amateur writer or an unpublished writer is still a writer. Yet it seems a stretch to call someone a writer who stopped writing years ago or who writes only an occasional letter or who adds a few paragraphs to a novel once every few months. I post something on this blog three times a week, but can I really call myself a writer? I would feel guilty if I did, as if I were somehow pretending. When I wrote for a newspaper I was a writer. Now I feel more like just someone who sometimes writes, like someone who sometimes fixes a leaky faucet or unclogs a drain.

A writer and an author are not quite the same thing. An author is someone with at least one published book.  Once an author, always an author. But is someone who used to write still a writer? Harper Lee was still an author when she died, but was she a writer or a former writer?

As you can probably tell, I am not entirely sure how to define the term. If a writer is someone who writes, then virtually all of us are writers. Is someone who writes a note to a neighbor or makes out a grocery list a writer? Or is a writer someone who attempts to write creativity? Or someone who writes for an audience? Or just someone who writes regularly for whatever purpose?

One online dictionary defines the word as "a person who has written a particular text." In other words, a student who writes a term paper (or has ever written a term paper) is a writer. A person who writes a letter or an email or a text to a friend is a writer. And I'm a plumber.