So do I regret doing NaNo? No. While I know it didn’t produce a literary or even particularly literate novel, it helped me to get back into the habit of writing fairly regularly and understanding what I do poorly so that I can learn how to fix it. Writing is the first step in writing well, and while writing bad fiction doesn’t necessarily help, writing mediocre fiction is a logical starting point.

I argue that the terms “photographer” and “musician”, like “writer”, carry the implication of career-level dedication, and it’s precisely this implication that people want to invoke when they use such terms about themselves.

So no, it’s not OK to call yourself a photographer, or musician, or artist or writer unless you have dedicated considerable time to improving your craft, have at least some aspirations to creating original art, and (perhaps most importantly) are prepared to have your work judged in comparison to professional standard, without caveats like “I’m just starting out” or “I don’t have the proper equipment”.

How about a “musician” if you play an instrument only in the privacy of your own home? Or at Open Mic nights?

Was this a typo on the interviewer’s part? Or were you being facetious, maybe? In the unlikelihood that you didn’t already know this, there were several famous American authors prior to 1906 (Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens and Henry James spring to mind).

All evidence to the contrary, unfortunately.