“I’m a writer.”

This is not going to end well. If they genuinely are, we are consumed by a combination of admiration and envy. If it turns out they write blurbs for catalogues or other such hackery, then we are beyond annoyed.

After all, we write. We write regularly, on all manner of subjects. And we care about what we write.

But does that make us writers?As a kid I loved putting together my own comics, magazines and newspapers. I loved writing them. But I loved the production of them just as much. It was a wonderful sensation to have a real, actual artefact in my hands, which I had created. Obviously, being a kid, the production values were not high. We’re talking about a few pages stapled together. As I got a little older, it may have been typed, with some Letraset thrown in for headlines. But I loved the whole process.

As an adult, I’ve fallen for blogging. I enjoy writing, but I enjoy it far more for it being presented on a professional-looking website. It is an integral part of a tangible product, as opposed to being hidden away in a notebook. It is my grown-up stapled comic book, or badly typed magazine.

And people actually read it! Not many, I grant you. But those who do, and who comment, appear to be lovely, interesting and interested people. And people who write too. Really well. This is the audience I never had as a kid.

But does that make me a writer?

Or should I get caught up in believing that to be a writer, you should actually be published, or at least paid to write? I’ve written stuff as part of my job, but it was hardly my heartfelt life’s work. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a writer, as such, professionally.

But is a regular(ish) blog evidence enough to be a writer? It feels a little pretentious to view it that way, doesn’t it? There are great blogs and great bloggers out there. But there are also some truly awful, lazy ones. And my suspicion is that blogging is just too easy for bloggers to be considered ‘writers’ also. How long does it take to set a blog up – five minutes?

Reading The Guardian’s rules for writers it seems that proper, successful, real writers consider hard work, persistence and talent to be key tenets of writing. I’m not convinced I fulfil any of those.

Hard work. I’ll often just throw something up on here. I’m sure this blog is littered with typos and errors. My arguments are not always coherently thought-through and presented (this very post is a shining example). I hardly research. I barely edit. I spend far too much time coveting stationery, or fantasising about my perfect writing desk. I read more than most, but I still fall into the trap of reading rubbish. I’ll just as soon pick up one of London’s many, terrible, free magazines as a great novel.

Persistence. My updates are sporadic at best. I have a plum gig writing a column for BaseballGB, with a hugely supportive webmaster, yet often, shamefully, I let it slip. Here, on my own blog, I veer from one subject to the next, with little thought for my poor readers. I rarely see through any grand plans. I have ideas buzzing around my head for stories, yet I never get anywhere with them.

Talent. I’ve written some good stuff. I’ve written some dross. Beyond that, we’ll leave this one, as I think we’ve had enough self-pitying for one day.

So, I wouldn’t label myself a writer just yet. I doubt I would even label myself a blogger. I write, I blog, but that is as far as it goes right now, until I truly throw myself into either. If I truly throw myself into either. Maybe I’ll just be happy with a shiny product. A blog, that I created.

Of course, I could quit getting hung up on semantics, and just get on with it.

But if I am a writer, I think I am because I have an audience. A small, perfectly formed audience. Thank you for reading.

Image via Flickr by Miss Pupik

Or maybe it is just a phase. I do always read. A lot. But the medium isn’t always the same. Sometimes I just have to read a newspaper every day. Other times I realise I get most of my news online (although it’s not the same), or find my brain rotting from reading the free newspapers handed out in London and decide enough is enough.

Other times I’m all over magazines and, for want of a better word, journals. There is some fantastic magazine design out there – Wire magazine, in particular, and the late, lamented Plan B. There’s also some genuinely great writing hiding away in your old periodicals. The New Yorker is always a wonderful, informative and luxurious read. The New York Review of Books is similarly brain-nourishing. But it’s not all about mags from the Big Apple – how about When Saturday Comes and World Soccer, for pretty much peerless football coverage? Or Private Eye, still great after all these years?

But then, after a while, I realise that as immediate and bite-sized and shiny as magazines are, it is a good book that I really crave. A book that demands to be read, to be devoured. The sort of book that leaves you with a sense of loss when it’s over, because you just can’t read it anymore, that the story of those characters (real or imagined) has now finished.

And in an age of iPhones, iPads and all that jazz, and working in a role that falls directly under the banner of, ahem, ‘new media’, it’s interesting to me that all of this ‘old media’ still brings so much joy. These print formats are still vital to me. There is nothing quite like the feel, touch, smell, experience of books, magazines and newspapers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love computers and would be lost without the internet. But nothing will replace flicking through a newspaper in a pub, or a magazine in the garden on a sunny day, or an old book, curled up indoors on a winter’s night. Long may these simple pleasures last.

Image from Jasoon via Flickr