Being a "writer"

Is what I'm doing instead of studying for the CS 61A midterm.

I don’t know if I should consider myself as a writer.

Writing isn’t my passion per-se, I write sometimes, I read a lot more, I consume a lot more media, I watch a lot of film, these inspire me to pen down my thoughts, but I’m not a writer in the sense that I invent characters. I do suppose that’s called “fiction”, I don’t dabble in that, if you read my Substack you’d probably know.

In that sense I’m not a “creative”. I just write down my thoughts, sometimes people find that interesting, I don’t really know why. I’d say that a good portion of my friends because I’m writing what I think, and they just so happen to agree with what I think, or the way I think, or they relate to my experiences, or they find it interesting that they don’t.

But, I don’t invent the world, I just happen to exist in it. The thought of labeling myself as a writer didn’t cross my mind until today, when I was asked about it, and I spent two hours of lectures wondering why that thought never crossed my mind before. I mean, writers are necessarily creative, right? We hail those that are able to come up with stories, with characters, with plots that convey the writer’s thoughts about the world and reveals their moral compass. Non-fiction works, on the other hand, are often a means to an end for the transmission of information and directly shows the writer’s opinion; writers of such works put on multiple hats — those of historians, critics, philosophers — and writing is just a means for them to convey their thoughts on the subject matter that they’re specialised in.

I guess I’m not either of those things. Certainly I am able to string words together and I certainly do that more often than the average person but I’m not doing this in a very deliberate way. I simply write down my thoughts and don’t look back.

Maybe that’s what it means to be a writer. I don’t choose my words, I don’t see my writing as an “art”, I don’t think of my writing as a “craft”, and I most certainly don’t know how to perfect said craft. I simply write. I write to express my thoughts, especially to those who are physically so far away from me, I write to show you my world and my life, so that you can live vicariously through my writing.

I don’t know if I’m good at writing; I mean, there are a lack of quantifiable metrics when it comes to something so open-ended, but sometimes my friends tell me that they read all my writing and they love it for some reason or other, so I suppose I must be doing something at least a little right. Or maybe my friends are just unconditionally supportive (I have the best friends in the world; thank you).

Before this Substack account, there was the previous Substack account (that I created on a whim during work because I had nothing better to do, then I became busy with said work, and work eventually ended), and before that there was the Instagram account (if you know you know) (in my opinion the best post on there is the one about happiness, which I’ve since repurposed into a Substack post here). All this while I’ve never thought of myself as a writer, it’s not my life, and it won’t be. But, I can only give you my sincerity, in all my feelings, in all my thoughts; know that every time I talk about myself, about my friends, about you, all of that is true. If that is known, then the label of being a writer and the dilemma of taking it up becomes obsolete; nothing else matters.