Can I Call Myself A Writer?

I have begun to call myself a writer. It still feels weird. But it has gotten easier than it was nearly 10 years ago when I started blogging about my life experiences. It is true that writing is like exercising a muscle: the more you do it the better you become at it. 

My writing has changed a lot since 2009. There's more raw honesty, more depth in the storytelling. I have even faced the daunting task of staring at the blank screen and creating fiction, which is completely different than recounting how certain situation or experience affected me. Fiction is creating something from nothing. Intimidating. I have then let other people read said fiction. As a creative person with a fear of failure, putting my thoughts, ideas, and stories in front of other people's eyes is truly a feat of courage. 

However, I recently watched the film The Wife in which Glenn Close gives her Oscar nominated (and hopefully, finally, winning) performance as Joan Castleman, the title character. She is the wife of a writer. She is a writer herself. 

There is a scene in which her husband says, “a writer must write as he must breathe.” As soon as he said it, it gave me pause. Was Joan breathing? Am I? Of course I am. I breathe to live. Yet, I’m calling myself a writer, yet I don’t write every day. Sure, I try to be clever or intuitive or thought provoking in a Tweet or Instagram post. I try to use my words to greatest effect. But I don’t write every day. 

I don’t live and breathe a story for eight hours a day. Not even ten minutes a day on most days. But I love words. I love stringing them together to create a feeling, an emotion; to evoke a laugh, a tear, an understanding of a situation; to take the reader on a journey. 

Can I call myself a writer?

I recently finished watching the series You on Netflix. The main female character is a writer. She didn't write every day though. She would often say she was stuck. Social media, and life in general, were often distractions. (I know these distractions. Throw in television and porn and I'm fully distracted.) She admitted, if she was being honest, that she was just putting it off. (Guilty!) She once tried to justify her procrastination saying that thinking about what she wanted to write was just as much a part of the process. In her next breath though she acknowledged she was actually procrastinating. I believe a lot of her, and my, procrastination is fear of failure. Maybe even fear of success.

I often think about the stories and characters that are brewing in my head. I would go as far as to say that I think about many of them daily. But I don’t sit down and write about them. I often mull over my own life experiences and think about what I have to say in connection with something that inspires or angers me in the present. But I don’t write about it immediately. 

Can I call myself a writer?

There are times when words pour out of me like water; when essays practically write themselves; when I can’t type fast enough for the sentences forming in my brain. But it doesn’t happen every day. 

I don’t commit time daily to the computer screen. That long gestating party that I’ve been thinking about since 1990 is still waiting to be written. The piece on the importance of pink in my life is still waiting to be fully explored. The story of the half sisters who hate each other yet continue to work together is waiting for its next soap operatic confrontation. The fiction and the non, it sits there. But hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about that party and who is in attendance and what they are doing or saying. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about what pink means to me. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t wonder what is going on with those two women.

Can I call myself a writer? 

There are days when I can do nothing but write the words that are clawing their way out of my thoughts; when writing is the only form of expression that allows me to get the drama, the anger, the comedy, the provocation out of me. 

There are other days when I can't seem to find the words to say anything at all. 

The written word is probably the most authentic way in which I express myself. I am definitely a storyteller. And even though I have a body of work to my credit, calling myself a writer remains an uncomfortable label. My confidence ebbs and flows.

I may not write every day. I may be lazy and procrastinate. I may be afraid of the exploration of my thoughts, my opinions, my ideas, my past. I may be completely intimidated by the party scene that I won’t write. But I do know that without the ability to express myself in words, whenever I have something, anything, to say, I would be breathless.