How do you understand that you'll be a writer? #KylePhoenix

You don't.

Any pretensions initially basically mean you're a narcissistic asshole/fool. You simply start by the desire to express yourself like tens of millions have for millennia.
But if you consistently work at it from middle school to college and 10 years beyond, you're registered for the marathon.
Then.......

You write.

You write badly for years.

You take some classes, get some feedback, get that first thing nationally, internationally published.

(Writers Digest big book of magazine markets is great. I started off sending 20 submissions a month in college. One tome in a Barnes and noble I picked up an interesting magazine and one of my short stories was in it!)

Then you start thinking hmmmmmm?

But not yet.

Don’t label yourself. Get 10 years of writing under your belt, a few thousand pages. All the dreck out. (The Hemmingways a 500 page handwritten tome that was a soap opera of near biblical proportions. I wrote it from the 7th grade to the 9th, and other students passed it around school. The Dean pulled me into his office with my sudsy trope between us. He said I was a writer. I was slightly aghast and embarrassed.)

High school I wrote another eight 300 page manuscripts. Not the Hemmingways. A novella that I would submit while at college in Buffalo to one in Boulder, and they published more short stories, suggested the 125 page novel was a novel. A few years later, boom 500 pages.

I've published a lot of books, short stories, articles, blogs and the honest truth is I think, people name you a writer and then it sort of dawns on you like a sweater you've been wearing for years .

I was doing a book signing/event, maybe 50 people, a rainstorm got me there so late I just gave away the 60 books I had because people stayed. And I had it filmed for my TV show and people were asking me all these writerly questions.

It was about 20 years since I was passing around the Hemmingways and I was like
"Hmmmm, I think I'm a writer, author now."
20 years.
Minimum 10,000 pages.
4+ published books.
25 articles.
250 blogs.
Money paid to you for writing that allows you to buy yourself a nice dinner.
When you've made that much commitment you've earned the title in a true way not a goth kid with poetry that mentions trees, love, leaves, soul----the quad poetry signal of bad/amateur work. And then people will validate it back.

#KylePhoenix