On Being a Writer

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer—whatever that means.

When I was younger, I thought that being a writer meant writing novels. I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to be an author; I wanted to be an authority.

I can recall an incident in elementary school—I must have been in Grade 5 or 6—when an author of young adult fantasy novels visited the school to talk about his books and about being a writer. It must have been a reward for a certain group of students, or something, because I remember that only a few students were in the room when he gave his talk. It wasn’t a big assembly. It was held in the detention room, of all places.

At one point in his talk, that author talked about royalties and noted that he gets something like $0.25 per copy sold. Who still wants to be a writer? Ha ha ha…

Then he discussed the fact that the illustrator who designed the cover of his latest novel receives something like $10,000 per cover design. Who wants to be an illustrator? Ha ha ha…

While many hands were raised in response to this question, I was sitting there resigning myself to being poor. Writers are poor, I figured. And, frankly, this is often true (at least if writing is their only source of income).

These days, I still want to be a writer, but I’m not so sure what that means. I no longer think that it necessarily means being a novelist. And I hope that it doesn’t have to mean being poor.

For me, it probably means being a poet, since that’s mostly what I write now. But, then, maybe it means being a blogger. I probably blog more than I write poems.

Can I call myself a writer if I don’t get paid for most of my writing? Do you have to be paid for something to call yourself that thing (with regard to vocations)? I don’t think so. I mean, a volunteer firefighter is a firefighter just the same.

But, without pay, I am technically not a professional. Am I then, at best, an amateur writer? If so, is that a bad thing? I mean, Olympic athletes are amateurs (at least on paper…unless they’re hockey players, for some reason). They’re certainly not lesser than athletes who are paid for their sport.

Perhaps it’s enough to say that I’m a writer because I write.