I try to read a lot of books. I don’t always succeed. The War of Art is one I made it through, it was nice and short (although longer than i needed it to be, and dealt chiefly with the problem of resistance and how to overcome it. But there is one other very important idea at the core of this book that I’d like to talk about now. And that’s the idea of identity.

When do you become a writer?

At what point in your career do you become a writer? When you write your first book, when you get it published by a reputable publisher? When someone buys it? When it makes it to the top of a best seller list? or before that? Maybe when you first write something worth publishing. Or when you get an article or an essay posted in a periodical, or when you make money for writing anything, or when you think of the idea and resolutely set about doing the work such that nothing will distract you. Or earlier still.

Stephen Pressfield says you become a writer when you decide to be. You become a writer whenever you want, when you start to answer the question “what do you do” with “I’m a writer” or “I’m an author” instead of “Well I work at Starbucks (or whatever) but one day I hope to write.” Everything else, Stephen argues, is just degrees of the same thing. Identity is in your choice to identify, everything else is hard work.

So I’ve decided to be a online content creator. That includes being a writer, a YouTuber, a web designer and yes (sigh) a self-promoter and marketer. I’m a pastor, but I’m also a writer, and one day I will write a thing people will pay me for. I know I will. Because I already decided to, and all that’s left is hard work.