At the heart of my studies (and my teaching) is the question what is a writer? Certainly, it is not someone who simply writes things down; and nor is it necessarily someone who writes a text. An artist is not someone who daubs canvas with paint any further than frequent flyer is an aerospace engineer. Here’s a hint from Fowles about what writers do:
I have never really wanted to be a novelist. For me the word carries a load of bad connotation – like author and literature and reviewer, only worse. It suggests something factitious as well as fictitious, insipidly entertaining; train-journeyish. One can’t imagine a ‘novelist’ ever saying what he actually means or feels – one can hardly even imagine his meaning or feeling.
These words have bad connotations because they suggest that in some way writing and being a writer aren’t central human activities.
I’ve always wanted to write (in this order) poems, philosophy, and only then novels. I wouldn’t even put the whole category of activity – writing – first on my list of ambitions. My first ambition has always been to alter the society I live in; that is, to affect other lives. I think I begin to agree with Marx-Lenin: writing is a very second-rate way of bringing about revolution. But I recognise that all I am capable of is writing. I am a writer. Not a doer.
Society, existing among other human beings, challenges me, so I have to choose my weapon. I choose writing; but the thing that comes first is that I am challenged.
Of course, his statement of being ‘not a doer’ cannot be taken at face value; writing is very much doing.