Are You Writing, or Are You a Writer?

And whose business is it anyway?

When I was nineteen and employed at an inbound call center, answering the phones for solicitors and estate agents, I brought two things to my desk each day. The first was whatever book I was reading – The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan, The Muse by Jessie Burton or The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – and the second was the notebook in which I was drafting a book of my own. Between calls, I would jump to read or write a page, before the phone rang again and I had to drop my pen.

Beside me sat a boy one or two years older. Let’s call him John. He was slight and quietly funny, liked Doctor Who and wore a lot of plaid shirts. When he told me that he, too, dreamed of being a writer, I wasn’t surprised. Already, I had found that one admission of writing often prompted another. I would tell a colleague or some distant uncle that I was working on a book, and they would look impressed for all of ten seconds before confessing that they, too, had always fancied the idea. Or, better yet, that they suspected they might ‘have a story in them’, as if there are sixty-to-eighty thousand perfect words, just waiting for expulsion inside any one of us.

“Oh, wow,” I would say, blinking the haze of a night spent writing from my eyes.

Meanwhile, the wannabe writer’s would look faraway and dreamy.

"Producing a manuscript is no mean feat. You have to really, seriously want to do it, enough to turn down lots of nice invitations and sit in silence while the parties go on without you."

John, I’m afraid, was one of those. When he uttered a second sentence about his idea for a sci-fi book, I knew that he would never write it. Producing a manuscript is no mean feat. You have to really, seriously want to do it, enough to turn down lots of nice invitations and sit in silence while the parties go on without you. And so, naturally, the only idea capable of pulling you through will be one that you truly believe in. One that means a lot to you, or at least enough that you will guard it for your inherent, writerly fear of intellectual-property theft. There is also the danger that if you talk too much about your prospective book, you can fool yourself into considering it half-written and becoming complacent.

This didn’t seem to concern John.

He told me about a Facebook post that had reassured him: ‘Every day that you think about writing, you’re a writer’.

“Right,” I said.

But was John a writer? In all the months that we shared a desk, I never saw him scrabbling for his pen between phone calls. Instead, I saw him scrolling through social media feeds, sharing posts like that one from Facebook. He invited me along to several ‘mixers’ at our local Writing Centre, all of which I turned down. If I had time to do anything writing-related, after dinner on a worknight, then it would be writing. Nothing mattered more to me.

"Posting '#writer' will do nothing to raise its word count."

By the time I left my call-center job, I had signed with a literary agent. John congratulated me coldly, and I didn’t hear from him again. Was it his fault? That he had this romanticized idea of ‘being’ a writer, when he put no work into becoming one?

Maybe it’s boring of me, but I blame social media. Posts like the one John shared, kidding us that finished manuscripts will just happen for us with no hard work required, as well as posts stating the opposite. Selfies and reels from more outgoing writers (those rare creatures), boasting updates that make us feel inadequate. Like we are slacking, even if we are writing, for not showing our too-few followers. How much? How often? How long until they can read something?

I fall into this trap, now and then, of giving too much thought to my social media presence. Yes, it’s important (apparently) to be visible on all these platforms, and the immediate gratification of getting likes and comments is tempting. By contrast, I might go months without any feedback on the book I am writing. But posting ‘#writer’ will do nothing to raise its word count.

"We are naive to think that we can ever 'make it' to some fixed state of writerliness."

The kicker is that there is no real way of quantifying a writer. And so, even if you have written twenty books and won ten awards, your Bluesky bio will say the same thing as John’s. The only thing that you can quantify is, again, the writing itself.

And that never ends. In the last few years, I have met writers far more established than I am, who sell tens of thousands of copies of every book they release, and they still ‘part ways’ with their agents and publishers, if they lose form or miss too many deadlines. Meaning, we are naive to think that we can ever ‘make it’ to some fixed state of writerliness.

Ironically, I have heard one of those more established writers – when talking about his girlfriend – say, dismissively, “She writes.” But refuse to acknowledge her as ‘a writer’, as though having forgotten that what made him one was the act of writing itself.

“So, what do you do?”

“I write,” is what I say now, when anyone asks. Not that I am a writer, but that I practice writing. “How about you?”