Many years ago, someone placed a very unsettling thought before me. It was the mother of one of my son's friends, while picking up her little boy from our house. We'd never met before, so I asked her in and we started chatting. Soon she asked me what I did (if anything) for a living. I paused a moment and then said:
"I'm a writer".
"Oh so has anyone ever heard of you?"
It was not the reaction I expected, and certainly not the kind of question you like to answer, especially when, no, not many people have heard of you.
At the time I felt self conscious, a little apologetic about being a writer, as if I was confessing to something related to the amount of wind I typically passed a day. After all, I had only ever published articles in a local parenting magazine, and one fictional short story in another magazine, and as excellent as these publications were, not everyone had heard of them.
I resided beneath my own private little pebble, sifting through life's grit, digging into its roots in search of gems to capture creatively. It was a lonely way to live, not reaching out with your passions, but that is the way it often is for the artist of the word.
I didn't answer the lady's question. I mumbled refreshments and politesse, and soon it was time for her to go home.
Thankfully we moved city that week, and I never met her again.
But the question didn't move on.
Am I a writer?
When people see my amateurish paintings they are often bowled over.
"You're an artist!"
That bothers me. It is hardly true. I want to tell them: "No, I am a writer who enjoys painting," but that seems a bit cocky, boasting about another talent when someone is trying to make a compliment on the one they can actually see. Then I realise that that is just the point: it's what they can see. Visual arts do that to you because they are, well, visual, and can create an immediate reaction in the viewer. Writing is different. It is harder to share (you don't hang it up on the wall unless you're Susan Polis Schutz, and even then, you need inspiring artwork-visuals- to go with the inspiring words). Of course there are people on Twitter and people who have blogs like this one, but does that make them all writers? Not everyone is going to write work that will be on the best seller list, or a masterpiece that will be taught in college for the next five hundred years. We aren't all going to have movies made out of our great work, but if we truly see ourselves as writers, no one can take that away from us.
Today I can answer that question with quiet confidence. You won't find me on Google or Amazon or in your local bookshop (yet). But writing is what I love and what I need. I have been writing forever, therefore:
I. Am. A. Writer.
