Everyone’s a writer these days, but am I?

by Grey Drane

Like about one out of every two people you meet these days, I have aspired to being a writer for quite a few years now. I’m actually pretty good at it, technically and linguistically speaking. I’ve also made a living as a professional translator for about 15 years now, so I get lots of practice writing (in the strictest meaning of the term). The thing is, though, I always “fail” all those “You know you’re a writer if…” tests and can never relate to more than about one or two of the traits that a writer is “supposed” to have.

So lately I’ve been asking myself, if I’m not a writer, what am I? Or am I a writer and just don’t fit the mold of what a writer is “supposed” to be?

I could just say that I “am” a translator. OK, fair enough. I am, after all. And I’m pretty darn good at it if I do say so myself. But I can’t say that I really love it. At least not the kind of translating I do for a living, which is mostly financial, economic, administrative and other business-related texts. I do enjoy translating the occasional bit of fiction that happens to come my way, more than the dry business stuff anyway.

But then there’s the fact that I really don’t like the Italian language (the language I translate from). Not because it’s hard (it’s not particularly) or because it sounds ugly (it doesn’t). I don’t like the Italian language because, to me, it always sounds so forced, stilted. There’s a saying here that only people from Florence actually speak Italian as their mother tongue, and I get the sense that there’s quite a bit of truth to that. Yes, younger people don’t speak their local dialects as much as previous generations (or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they speak Italian better than the older generations), but you can still sense a distinct difference in ease and comfort between when even a young person is speaking (even if only partly) in dialect and when they’re making a conscious effort to speak proper Italian. Before I go too far off on a tangent, all of this is to say that I can’t really see myself “finding my bliss” in translating from Italian, regardless of the type of text. Maybe if I could translate from the Venetian dialect, but who writes in Venetian anymore?!

One of the traits you always find in those “You know you’re a writer if…” things is some variation on the fact that you’re always correcting other people’s grammar, and that’s one of the only ones I can always tick off. So if I’m not a writer or a translator, maybe I’m an editor. I like editing and the idea of being an editor, but how would someone like me go about becoming an editor. I mean, it’s not like writing. I can’t “just edit”. Someone has to allow me to edit their work. They have to want me to do it and (ideally) want to pay me for doing it. But I don’t have a degree in English. I’ve just got a BS in Business Administration. I know I’d be good at editing, but how do I prove that to anyone else? If I edit something unsollicited, I’ll most likely just piss someone off.

So I come back to writing, since it’s something I can “just do”. But the fact is that I don’t. Not much anyway. And certainly not compulsively. I do get the beginnings of ideas of things to write about (both fiction and non-fiction) all the time, but either I don’t jot it down immediately and then I forget about it, or I do remember it for whatever reason and then decide that I don’t know enough about it to write with any sort of authority, or I find any number of other reasons — all essentially down to a lack of confidence, I’d imagine — not to write about it.

Speaking of this and of things that I am, I “am” something of an introvert, so I prefer to express myself in writing (as opposed to speaking) because it gives me time to process my thoughts at my own pace. I used to waste hours on end writing messages in discussion forums on topics that interest me, but almost always starting from the ideas of others and replying to their posts, not so much offering up my own ideas as a starting point. Actually, this propensity for building on the ideas of others also pointed me in the direction of editing or something similar, but again, how to start?

In the meantime, I’m gonna take advantage of Medium to see if it’s the sort of platform I need to “just write”. I’ve been trying off and on to blog for many years and have never had much success, but Medium may just be different enough from blogging that I’ll find that I am, after all, a writer.

Maybe if you recommend this story (click the green heart thingy below!), you’ll convince me that I really am a writer!