Your brother buys you 2 writing books and a book for research for your novel for your birthday and you drag the whole family to the library as your birthday day out to get the next book in the series you are reading. What things do you do that tag you as a writer?
When your first draft is utter trash and you haven't become an author yet due to constant imposter syndrome. When you write.
Until about a year and a half ago, it was the ever-present microcassette recorder in my workbag. Now it would be the fact that I have pens everywhere and even keep a fountain pen and cartridges and binder clips and notebooks at my sister's house and at my mom's house so I don't have to travel with them.
If you are eating cherries staining your lips and fingertips with juice making them look like they're stained with blood. Then you look at your other hand... It's covered in glistening blood. You drank all the blood from a writingforums.org member @Stormsong07... She was too delicious to pass up. Especially after I cooled her hot body from the sunburn with my cold skin. Mmmm Stormsong07 skin tastes almost as good as her blood. If you have writers block.
I can't think about anything other than your story. I never shut up about my story. It takes me three years to figure out that between two stories (550pgs., 500words/pg?) it's 275,000 words, that I have utterly blundered through. JFC, no wonder I can't figure out what to do with it! I'm scared. What the hell am I? Sorry, I can't be a writer just because I wrote a lot?
If all your notebooks are full of scribbles and your computers are cluttered with documents titled "ideas", "draft", "scraps", "scenes", "prompts" but you never finish any of those because, let's face it, your lazy ass will never be competent enough to become a real author. you should concentrate on one project at a time.
You have about 4 notebooks, and multiple pens strewn around your house, and each book has different things in: poems, stories, info, first drafts. If you have little scraps of paper around the place with various things scribbled on them, that may one day make up a poem, a story, or something.
... your best friend's holiday reading includes 5 pages of your WIP that she wants to finish reading before she sees you again a couple of days after she gets back.
What a good brother. ... whenever the muse hits you with her rhythm stick and you have no other choice than to kick everything else out of your mind and indulge in her fantasy, recording it down. Maybe for hours, maybe for days. There's no rest for the wicked, since anything else is way down the list.
I've had my muse inspire me on my way home, which resulted in me sitting on the grass alongside the motorway (I don't drive) to write it down! And when I'm about to fall asleep...she creeps up on me, and I have to get a pen and paper! What hardships we endure!
You might be a writer if you spend all your waking time reading on a forum about writing, so that you end up with no time to write yourself. Oh, wait...
Poetry dances on your tongue. Betwixt between oh fallen spine, dark thoughts twist hidden behind fallen vine. You've lost your book of quotes at the worst of times, when words flow like dreams likened to butter on your tongue melts. Swept downward, upward, toss aside room maelstrom wept sea. Oh book of quotes where are thou in my hour of need.
You see my precious, how the words betray? They gather and beckon, and then flow away, like the river that sweeps and carries you astray...
You have a list of poem titles, and parts of poems, and even a song or two...but can't seem to bring any of them to a finish!
...people can tell exactly what you were doing that day by the trail of paper, pens, dented office couch pillows, and empty coffee mugs left in your wake.