I was checking out the creative profile site impnow.com, and came across a little video by editor H. Christine Lindblom. In it, Ms. Lindblom characterizes the difference between writers and authors: She says that “authors share,” and that not all writers are willing to make the committment to get themselves and their work out there.

“An author has chosen to have a career. They’ve chosen to be on the the road. They’ve chosen to have a Web site….”

I don’t mean to flame this author of this nice little video. It’s otherwise well thought out and informative. But the writer – author conundrum is a pet peeve of mine.

The implication is that Author is a job title. It’s not. A writer is always a writer, even after many books have been published. An author of a book is always still a writer by career.

A writer is someone who writes. If he writes something and shares it, he is the author of it. Same person, two perspectives.

An author is the writer, or group of writers, or an entity such as a company, who has responsibility for the creation of a particular work. For example, William Faulkner was a writer and the author of The Sound and the Fury. Robert Frost – Poet – author of North of Boston.

I am – in addition to being a creative writer and poet – a technical writer. I have collaborated with other writers to produce sets of manuals and documents for a product, the ultimate author of which is the company for which we worked while writing.

I have written industrial books which are published, and delivered to customers, of which I was not the author. I wrote the whole thing, but the author was the company.

If a farmer writes a beautiful diary and hides it under the bed, and dies, and his great grandson gets it published, who is the author? The grandson? Even if he never writes so much as a query letter, or publishes another page? See, it’s not so simple as “the author has chosen to have a career.” Neither of these people did. But the farmer is now the posthumous author of a memoir, even though he never meant to share a thing, or made a commitment to writing as a career at all.

If you go behind the scenes of a TV show, happily you’ll now find a staff of writers. Who is the author of the show? The creator? Producer? Director? Only the lead writer? The actors? By Ms. Lindblom’s logic, all those staff writers – not being authors – toiled away with no intention of getting themselves and their work out there. I say they are all writers, and co-authors of the show. But you would introduce such a writer as a writer, not an author.

So “Author” is never a job title in itself. It’s always “author of …” If I am the author of a thousand books and poems, I am still a writer and a poet.

Writers write. There are amatuers and professionals, and all manner of failure and success. When a writer manages to communicate, it is his/her relationship to the product of creation that creates authorship.

“The speed with which a literary magazine responds to submissions is a frequent topic of conversation among those who, as editors take their sweet time wading through the slush pile, are necessarily biding theirs. As the weeks and months pass, it can become a bit of an obsession, and with the preponderance of online journals (not to mention print magazines accepting e-mail submissions), the wait—no longer a matter of eager anticipation of the friendly postal carrier’s daily visit, but an all-day in-box vigil—can be too much. Pity the writer who wonders what happened to not only her submission but also to her e-mail inquiring about her submission. Official response times vary widely.”

Poets&Writers, Inc., from the Jan/Feb 2008 issue.

I think the longest I’ve ever waited for a response was around 10 weeks. But I can relate to both the anxiety of waiting and the overwhelming pressure of a pile of slush.