What It Means to be a Writer

The most difficult part of being a writer sometimes seems to be that moment when a person that I've just met asks me, "so what do you do?" The simple answer, ("I'm a writer") never really suffices to explain what it is that I do on a daily basis. Worse, it always provokes the follow-up question: "what do you write?"

The truth about being a writer is that sometimes you write almost anything that someone else will pay you to write so that you can get your bills for the month taken care of and at other times you write a whole bunch of stuff that may or may not ever get read because you just simply feel compelled to write it. The truth about being a writer is that you are constantly walking a tightrope between writing purely for profit and writing purely for pay.

I have been working as a professional writer for about ten years now which means that I have learned to walk that tightrope fairly well. Most of the time, I can balance in the middle where I am working on a variety of different projects about which I am passionate to varying degrees and through which I am earning varying rates of pay for my work.

This means that sometimes I am a technology blogger and sometimes I am working on a book and sometimes I am writing keyword-rich content articles for the web and sometimes I'm embarking on the launch of a new mostly-for-fun project (like my San Francisco is Sexy blog). And it means that I am always writing.

What I do best is take ideas and put them into words so that other people can understand them. I try to hone the craft of writing so that I can convey the images and thoughts that are circulating throughout my brain surrounding any given topic in a manner that is going to really resonate with the minds of the people who read what I write. As a freelance contractor, this means that I do my job well to meet the needs of the clients or sites that hire me. As a creative writer, it means that I always try to push myself to that next level of getting better at putting notions into words.

What it means to be a writer is to write and to get better and better at writing well. My portfolio of blogging work, web writing, print publications and other projects attests to the fact that I am indeed a writer and hints at what that means I do each day.