All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed

I'm a writer.

It has taken me more than forty years on this earth to say that without embarrassment or defensiveness, to have evidence to back it up, and, most of all, for it to feel right. Writing is what I do, from straight journalism to copywriting and everything in between. It's about the deploying of words, the strategy of language and the creation of a story.

I suppose it's always been that way. Some of my earliest, fragmented memories are of my mother (a skilled writer herself) telling me tales to keep me amused and interested. Once I could read independently, I inhaled books, fiction and non-fiction. There were the usual suspects: Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and a strong sideline in meaty thrillers like The Day of the Jackal, The Eagle Has Landed and HMS Ulysses. But I consumed stories from everywhere. What I didn't know about Rommel's leadership of the Ghost Division in the invasion of France, or the final, bloody days and weeks in Berlin as the Russian crawled closer, wasn't worth knowing.

It wasn't long before, instinctively, what I read began to plant the seeds of what I wrote. At one point, a friend and I decided we would write a new history of the Second World War, as if that needed doing (though, looking at book sales these days, perhaps we should have persisted). Whether I was retelling history through my own lens, or creating my own past, present and future, there was this urge, this compulsion, almost, to write.

If I've been so steeped in it, you might ask, why have I for so long hesitated to call myself a "writer"? Why not be bold, seize the title for myself? You dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Well, it's not quite that easy.

A lot of people think they might be writers. More of them are right than will ever be published, but that's the commercial reality of today's world. And then there is the pernicious but comforting lie we tell ourselves and others that everyone "has in book in them". Not so, not so at all. Some people are sponges, and that is part of being a writer, but the desire to regurgitate in your own words the last book you read does not make you an author. We're all guilty of it, of course. Reading a good book, one with a great idea in it or a tremendous plot, is like being let into a secret. You feel privileged to be one of the initiates, and it's only natural to want to put your own spin on it. But that may not be the volume the world has been waiting for.

There's something else, too. Thomas Mann said that "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people", and I believe that wholeheartedly. Writers don't just live with self-doubt, they invite it in and give it free run of the east wing. I've certainly met precious few writers who would admit to looking at an article, an essay, even a paragraph, and saying, "Yes, that is good, it is well-crafted, and I cannot improve upon it." I have a particularly parenthetic style of writing - I am the same in conversation, as my friends know all too well - and so at the end of any word-limited task there will always be one more aside, one piquant reference, one jolly obiter dictum that I feel would improve it. Sometimes, you need to say enough is enough; mostly, you need an editor to say that.

So for anyone who isn't embalmed in solipsism, it is a big thing to say "I am a writer". But it's hugely important. First, it gives you a sense of identity and self-justification: if you write words and get paid for it, then, dammit, you are a writer. Secondly, it neatly describes the wellspring of the craft, that essential first step without which none of us has any claim to status at all. You need to write. My dear friend Mark Heywood, who runs a writing salon, will tell you that he cannot edit a blank page. The setting-down of words, however badly or haphazardly, is essential.

Nor should we be too hard on ourselves. Yes, most writers would love a critically acclaimed smash hit debut novel, or a Pulitzer-winning campaign of journalism; but writers pop up more frequently than you think. People who draft speeches for politicians or CEOs; people who devise advertising copy for print or broadcast media; people who oversee social media campaigns: all of these are writers, though they may not always feel like it.

The trouble is that you cannot tell writers anything. They always have to find out the hard way. Perhaps it's a stubborn determination to experience life at its hardest-edged. Perhaps we just learn slowly. The saving grace, though, is that it doesn't matter. You don't need to tell a writer to write. They can't stop. It will gush out of them unstoppably, or ooze like treacle, and it will bloody well hurt, but it will come out. That's how you know you're a writer.

And as for me, well, I have an article to go and write. Ta ta.