Is a writer merely defined as someone who writes or are there additional qualities required?
The way that creative writers use the term Writer, I’ve noticed, is limited to people who write creatively. They say “Writers” and exclude all those people whose expertise is in another field, the people who dip into writing only to communicate their ideas. Public figures, technical writers, and most academics don’t qualify, even if they’ve written extensively.
At first that seems unfair. A writer should be anyone with the courage to put words on the page.
But I think the creative folks are getting at an important division between different types of writers. A Writer in the loftiest sense is someone who would write even if language was emptied of meaning. That type of Writer is someone who writes primarily because they love spleunking through the cavities and caverns of language, the soar and dip of sentences, and the tonal friction of words as they rub up against each other.
If written language was emptied of meaning, most non-creative writers would never write again. Hey, even most creative Writers would never write again. Or at least they’d be put off for some time. But I think many Writers would come back, drawn by the allure of letters mashed up against one another and the sounds created. The need for language, written language, is deeply embedded.
And I think that because of that attention to language, Writers believe that fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and playwriting are all the most difficult terrains to traverse in the writing world. It’s not that it’s easy to write anything else — on the contrary. It’s just that in those other forms of writing the difficulty is in thought and organization and presentation and clarity, not in the wild badlands of beautiful sentences, ambiguous language choice, and tropes of all shapes and sizes. For those who devote their entire life to writing, the uppercase Writer, the main difficulty is wrestling with language itself.
