If you’re a writer then you have the desire to write. It may be sporadic, it may be a fight some days, but on most days you want to scratch your thoughts out. You find it hard to not pick up a pen, pencil, or keyboard and put something of yourself to paper and screen. It doesn’t matter if you have been published or not. What does matter is that you are getting your thoughts to another medium that is not inside of you.

This brings us to the question of what is an Author. An author is commonly accepted as someone who either writes a book, article, or report. It is not genre-specific and you don’t have to be well known to have done any of those. It does seem to be iffy on if you should be published or not. In my personal experience, the only people who actually call themselves authors are those who publish books. In my personal circle, I have people who publish articles and write for scientific journals. They also get paid for doing both. However, none of them consider themselves authors. They will say they wrote something and leave it at that. According to the definition, however, they are authors. A more definite form of distinguishing yourself is to join a guild or group that has specific guidelines for what they accept as authors. This is a subject beyond the scope of this article, but groups like these usually have a set of standards that must be met before you can call yourself the “A” word.

Writers are a bit more nebulous as far as definitions go. Literally, anyone can be a writer. Do you write music, paragraphs for school, a sentence on the side of the highway? Congratulations you’re a writer! And there is nothing wrong with that. There is a whole wide world of creativity for the medium of words, and there should be no bar to it. The sky should be the limit in regards to what you put down as long as you’re committed to doing so. That is the beautiful and sometimes terrifying part about writing is that anyone can do it. If you have something to say and pen to scratch it out then you can make your voice heard.

At the end of the day what you call yourself is up to you. There are very few people who are out here pulling people’s punk card in regards to their writing because it’s easy to show a body of work for most people. If you’ve written paper after paper for college, and can pull up your work on a computer you can call yourself a writer. If you have written poems in the basement on parchment using a quill you can say that you are an author. Whatever you do it is up to you to define yourself.