My wonderful partner in life, love and the occasional jaywalk, Brad, is currently working toward his Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing at Emerson College. He goes to workshops twice a week, takes literature classes and comes home to read classmates’ stories and write his own. What this means for me is that I often have the pleasure of a) occasionally copyediting his stories and b) going out with his fellow MFA candidates.

Copyediting is really fun for me. The MFAs are really interesting.

Don’t get me wrong; they’re cool people, and I like them a lot. But here’s the thing. If you only know a group of people from work or school or Astronomy Club, you can only really talk about work or school or that annoying kid Dan from Astronomy Club. But I’m not in Astronomy Club. Or an MFA program. So I’m at a bit of a loss at these outings. Like, one of these people has 12 copies of Fahrenheit 451. To further illustrate my point, here are two real things that have happened at various bars across Boston.

• Someone asked us to go around the table and name which four authors we would nominate to be featured on the Writer’s Mount Rushmore.
• Someone asked us to go around the table and answer the question, “WHY do you write?”

The second one got me thinking a little. Because that’s not really a question that circulates throughout my group of writers — mostly journalistic writers. Why do we write? Got bills to pay, man! Gotta live in this capitalistic society! Gotta write to eat, gotta eat to live, gotta spend $12 at Chipotle because we’re in the office 24/7 and can’t eat another Vending Machine Buffet Dinner.

But we all chose journalism at one point or another, right? So why did we do that?

For me, it was because people had been telling me my whole life that I was a good writer, and I took that at face value. Spurred on by pamphlets in the mail for Duke University’s youth writing program — which I never attended, just the prospect was enough — I decided to be a writer when I was 8 or 9. Immediately after that, I decided that being a capital-letter Writer was a largely impractical career move, so I narrowed my focus to journalism. Never really tried out or considered anything else. Fast forward a couple years, and a girl in my karate class told me that Mizzou was the No. 1 journalism school in the country. Sold! I applied, got in, and arrived on campus the following August. Suddenly, I was surrounded by students who had also been Editor-in-Chief of their school newspapers, who had also been writing for their local newspaper for a couple years, and who had also aspired to be journalists for much of their lives.

It was weird. I learned pretty quickly that writing isn’t exactly an easily defined skill. A journalism (or English/Communications, if you couldn’t swing J1100) degree isn’t like a degree in medicine or engineering or accounting. Writing doesn’t necessarily require a certain amount of training or methodology. Anyone can call themselves a writer. And, really, everyone is a writer. People write emails every day. Draft reports and analyses. Send texts. It’s not always terribly meaningful, but sometimes it is. Given that, proving yourself as a writer seems to me to be a little more difficult than proving yourself as a mechanical engineer.

“Oh, you have a mechanical engineering degree? Great. I believe that you know all the mechanical engineering stuff.”

“You’re a writer? Okay. Well. We’ll see.”

So when I’m with these groups of people whose identities center very strongly on the moniker of Writer, I don’t know that I fall into the same category. Sometimes it feels like journalism school beat all of the creativity out of me. We learned about the inverted pyramid and finding reliable sources and writing quickly quickly quickly, and I kind of forgot how it felt to craft a story with intent and precision. Even as a magazine editor, I didn’t really know how to fall back into longform. I’d become more interested in comma splices and hyphens, which are obviously are super important part of writing, but I didn’t get into journalism because of my love for properly placed commas.

So am I still a writer? I mean, yes, it’s my literal job; it’s the only reason people give me money. I exchange Word files and Google docs for dollar bills. Am I a Writer? I’m working on it. I’d say I lean a little more toward Editor, which is a job I love. But I mostly do it for free. Passion projects and favors. Even in middle and high school, I remember smuggling friends’ research papers into math class and editing them for grammar and structure. “It’s really good!” I would say, handing them back a packet covered in ink.

I love words. And I’m not really sure where that love is going to take me just yet. But for now, just the love is enough.