With easy access to the web, we can all get our scribblings read by a potentially enormous audience. But does that make us all ‘writers’?
It has been my honour to pen (if you can call it that when it involves fat fingers and a keyboard) this newspaper column for almost two years now. By my calculations, that means you’ve had to endure the alarming experience of more than 50,000 of our language’s finest words being haphazardly assembled into sentences, before appearing in your newspaper underneath a frightening picture of me, seemingly sternly watching you to make sure you read it. Read it!
I can only apologise. Whilst I accept that that makes me a Columnist, I’m still embarrassed when anyone suggests that I am therefore, by extension, also a Writer.
Awkward, that. Whilst Douglas Adams’ genius certainly classes him as “An artist of the written word” (as one definition has it), and Bill Shakespeare “Contributes significantly to the cultural content of society” (as another suggests), I certainly don’t qualify as a ‘writer’ if that’s how it’s defined.
Like a hungry person looking for lunch and realising they not only can’t afford steak at posh restaurant, but may even struggle to afford chips with their fish, I’ve no problem with the concept that my output is the nosh equivalent of a reduced to clear ‘value’ cheese sandwich from the supermarket.
So even “A person engaged in writing books, articles, stories etc., especially as an occupation or profession” still feels a bit like a Ferrari badge on a Fiat Punto to me.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on myself. I’ve seen twitter bios that grandly claim that the owner of the account is a Writer, but can you really classify yourself as such in 140 characters? By that reckoning, writing “beer” and “pork scratchings” on your shopping list should count. Although if you’re Arthur Conan Doyle wanting a night off from the pub, I suppose it probably should.
Then there’s the wonderful world of Blogs. Anyone can set one up and have a fine old time emptying the content of their head onto the internet. If they’re lucky, their tiny voice will get heard by someone in the deafening roar of millions of others doing likewise, and they may gain a regular readership.
Clearly, it helps if they’re actually talented and have something interesting to say, but luckily that doesn’t have to be the case. After all, I’m only here because I entered the North West Evening Mail’s Big Blogger competition in January 2012, and blackmailed suitably large quantity of friends, family and colleagues into reading it regularly. Or at least going to the web page to shut me up. It pays not to think too hard about that, if I’m honest.
So maybe I should just accept that I am a writer – as long as we agree that the definition “Someone who has written something” is applied. I’m comfortable with that.
It's possible that this post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 18th of April 2014. It's not appeared on their website yet, but then it quite often seems to show up, unannounced, on the Monday of the following week.
If you'd like to join the hunt for it, you can always keep an eye on their website's blog section here. If nothing else, you can marvel at the actually quite decent columnists they do have, such as Darren McSweeney and MP Tim Farron. I consider it my solemn duty to ensure that the average standard of columns never gets too high.
(Mash-up CD's still playing! This afternoon's is an entire concept album by The Silence Experiment/Q-Unit, mixing Queen songs with rap tunes. Surprisingly effective, and startlingly quite good...)
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