Can you call yourself a writer if you don't publish your work?

Spoiler: Yes and yes. For so many reasons.

Picture the scene.

You’re sitting in a pavement café, sipping coffee, thinking big thoughts. Your notebook is open on the table in front of you. The sun is shining. (You do not have post-it notes, by the way. I have no idea why there are post-it notes in the above royalty-free photo. But I digress.)

The waiter brings you another coffee. You sigh and think about the big, fat advance that is sitting in your bank account. You’re practically being paid to sip coffee and write your next book.

You are finally a writer. A real writer.

Cut to this.

‘I’ve never published anything - and I’m not sure I ever will - so I really don’t think of myself as a writer.’

‘I’m not a real writer, not in that sense of the word.’

‘It feels a bit pretentious to call myself a writer.’

The images that we form in our minds of what being a writer - a real writer - looks like and feels like can be very limiting.

The truth is that I’ve never met anyone who feels that they’ve truly arrived as a real and proper writer. No, not even the best-selling, million-copy-shifting novelists. (They think their commercial fiction isn’t ‘proper’ fiction.)

Not even the prize-winning poets. (They are all terrified that it will take them ten years to produce their next collection and, by then, they’ll have lost their publisher and possibly their university teaching post.)

So what does it mean to be a ‘real writer’? Who are these exotic creatures? Where are they (when they are not sitting outside Paris cafés) and what do they write?