I’m a writer, but so are you. So is everybody. What does “writer” even mean?
Pretty much everyone I know writes. They write emails, Facebook comments, Reddit posts, text messages. They report news, tell personal stories, express frustration or joy, often while trying to be clever or amusing. I do the same thing, sometimes for payment and sometimes because I just feel compelled.
However, very few people I know actually write, at least in the old sense. Most people type on keyboards, tap phone screens, dictate to dictation apps, or, frighteningly, feed barely coherent prompts to ChatGPT. I rarely write using a pen and paper except for when I write reminder notes or scribble nonsense when I’m in meeting. Once in a great while I write a letter, but that’s only when I want to person to know: this is important. Into my early 20s, I often wrote and received handwritten letters. I have kept a few relics from a golden past. Most, I’m afraid, ended in a bin.
I sometimes refer to myself as a writer, but only as way to describe one the ways I earn a living. I might quality this by saying that I’m a content writer, a term I dislike but use anyway. I didn’t even know what a content writer was until I inadvertently became one after a company contact me about ten years ago in search of someone to write material for their website. After that, I reoriented and rebranded myself. Still, content writer is an ambiguous and decidedly unsexy term, but it does encompass some of what I produce for paying clients: ghostwritten articles, blog posts, interviews for publications, or even speeches. Sometimes I’m hired to edit or proofread a text, to “fix it, make it better,” as the request may go. I also offer my copywriting services. If content is prose, then copy is poetry: pointed, very economical, and often with precise messaging.
Because the term “content writer” is unknown to most people and rightly so, I’ll sometimes just say that I’m a journalist, but I always have a pang of guilt when I say this even though I do, technically speaking, write both news and feature articles for journals. However, I know that when people thing of journalist, they think of someone who is accredited, intrepid, and in search of a story to uncover – and probably underpaid. I’m only one of these.
If I see that I haven’t lost my conversation partner’s attention after saying I’m a content writer, or if I see one of their eyebrows raise more than a centimeter, I might elaborate further and say, “I also write satire and humor.” This is, again, a way to describe my means of generating income. In 2017, I created a satire blog called the Luxembourg Wurst, which is, as you may have guessed, about Luxembourg. It is largely inspired by my love of the Onion (the pre-corporate-buyout Onion, at least) and my observations of the quirks about the country.
Since 2018, the media company RTL Today has featured a weekly Luxembourg Wurst piece .
If I see I’ve not totally lost the interest of the person to whom I’m speaking, or if there’s such a great lull in the conversation that emergency action must be taken, or if I find myself with trapped with another person in a bomb shelter and we’ve exhausted every other possible topic of conversation, then I might take the step of saying, “I also write fiction.”
Here’s where things get murky…