During my term as editor of Gilbert Magazine, a wise man passed this along to me:
You're not a writer if
10. You don't really believe that good writing is re-writing.
9. You've never spent over fifteen minutes trying find one single best word.
8. You've never written a first draft of which not one phrase made it to your final draft.
7. You've never put aside a written piece for a week or a month so you could return to it with fresh eyes.
6. You find it easy to produce a good one-thousand word essay in a single day.
5. You don't routinely put your work into the hands of a candid friend who knows good writing from bad.
4. You don't believe in your heart that if your writing is misunderstood, it's your fault, not the reader's fault.
3. You've never torn up a written piece over which you've slaved so that you might begin again from scratch.
2. You never read your written pieces out loud (to hear awkwardly expressed passages).
1. You write to express yourself and not to communicate something to an audience.
