The Differences Between a Writer and Someone Who Writes

A writer isn't just someone who writes. In her head, it's words all day. She sees the world not as a place made up of things but of words about those things. She knows more meaning is contained in a phrase like "poison friends" than a paragraph long attempt at comparing emotional pain to a stab wound. A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, cause sunsets have been done before. A writer understands the capacity for words to embolden, to eviscerate, to cut a man in half. A writer's words have texture and an aesthetic--they mean one thing on paper and another in your mouth. A writer knows the word "perfume" has a scent, and "savory" a flavor. She also knows that the technical term for making you taste her words in synesthesia, but she'd rather show you than tell you.

A writer's mind is sticky, cavernous. It's a locus of constant invention and generation, but also of deconstruction and warfare. Its very synapses fire bullets between semicolons and periods. in the infancy of the day, or as it's expelling its final breath, an errant phrase will show up there unannounced and become lodged in some furrow. It'll keep the writer up at night, til she's built a temple, or at the very least, a sand castle around this.

A writer believes in truth but understands the utility of a lie. Someone who writes will think about a lie in terms of its anatomy; she'll see it as something with dead legs, flayed on a cold steel table, reeking of that stuff we use now instead of formaldehyde, because formaldehyde will kill you too. But a writer believes in a lie's biology and knows it's still alive, animated by some preternatural aspiration, an amorphous mass of amorphous cells, dividing and multiplying and taking on some new architectures everytime you look at this. A writer knows a lie doesn't want to die.

Someone who writes, writes from a place of common experience in a common language, beleaguered by tired phrases and obvious similes. A blogger writes for the Facebook share, but a writer writes for mind share. But still, in a way, a writer writes for herself. She writes for them, too, but only because it's a way in. A writer knows you'll get that analogy but kicks herself for drawing it.

Someone who writes, writes as herself. A writer's voice, on the other hand, is chameleon-like. She can write from the perspective of a nine-yo-child or a pair of hands and make you believe. A writer knows knows exactly what T. S. Elliot meant when he wrote, "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal." A writer not only fashions the image of a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, but could tease speech out of those waves and teach sign language to those claws. A writer drowns in deeper oceans.

Someone who writes understands writing in terms of something she does, not in terms of something she is. A writer is aware of singular stuff of which her soul is composed, but will never shake that gnawing feeling of inadequacy. She'll be at once inspired and made to feel inferior by other writer's words. But she'll continue to see the poetry in a broken watch, or a dog with one blue eye and one brown. She'll give you her heart on Saturday night for the story she gets to tell on a Sunday afternoon. She'll give you her soul always <3 And she'll give it to you in writing.

So, which one are you?

copied from thoughtcatalog.com, with some amendments