We Need to Have A Talk About Writing...

I think, at the simplest, being a "writer" is measured by quantity and quality.

If you can only assemble one sentence. You aren't a writer. Granted, if you keep stacking sentences together until it's a proper sized thing for whatever the project needs, then you've met the first threshold. Writers vary in their speed and size of their works, but generally, they have more than one good sentence in them.

Quality is the other metric. If you're writing is so incoherent as to be incomprehensible, akin to one of those badly translated VCR manuals, then you aren't a writer. That much is certain. True crap is crap because it is not intelligible and the point of being a writer is to convey ideas. If the idea isn't conveyed, the writer has failed.

I think I set a pretty low bar. Some crazy dude's rambling manifesto might have a lot of words, but if it doesn't make any sense, he's a writer, he's a crazy guy with a manifesto he typed up.

What happens after that, whether you've written one novel and that's it, just keep a journal, write some bad, but readable poems, you've met the minimal criteria, you are in the club, you're a writer as in one who writes and one who can write.

Truthfully, most people can qualify to be a writer. That doesn't mean their writing is great reading, but nor does it mean that there's not a few gems in there either, because good lines are like diamonds, you have to dig a bit to get to them.