Ben Abbott

Norton
AP Language and Composition
2 March 2015
What is a Writer?

A search for meaning and understanding has inhabited the human mind for quite some time. A
few members of the human race have even dedicated their lives and talents to helping this search live
on and thrive within people's minds. Writers are the guides to this search and aid seekers of this
understanding and knowledge to their goals. This is not to say, however, that writers are an enlightened
few who already posses these answers. This does ask what indeed a writer is. A writer is a conduit for
expression and someone who seeks to show people the truths within themselves. A writer is not an
instructor who guards the path to knowledge, but is a mentor to those who have yet to find the answers
they already hold.
One way that writers achieve this is by leaving the meaning of their works open to the
audience's interpretation. Authors generate free thought by conveying ideas to the audience. The works
of writers showcase faults, strength, and premise of a plethora of different ideas and leave them to the
audience's disposal to do with what they will. Writers do not command ideas into the minds of their
readers and that is what makes their work have a lasting impact on their audiences. Writers show ideas
to generate discussion and to help audiences push themselves through their quests for understanding.
Writers do not censor their work. They are the stewards of free information, but not its creators.
It is a common misconception that the stories that authors write about are about the worlds and
characters in them. This cannot be true because this would not accomplish the writer's goals of

Ben Abbott
Norton
AP Language and Composition
2 March 2015
conveying and would instead accomplish the goal of creating. The stories that authors craft are about
the ideas that the characters, scenery, and events convey. These are all the writer's tools to convey
messages. The focus of a story is not its characters or plot, but its central message that all of those
elements come together to create. These elements and tools are what the author uses to show problems
and ideas that exist in the real world. Because of this genre is less of a term to define what stories will
be about, and more of a term to define how the author wants to present his or her ideas to the reader.
John Updike summarizes this idea of conveying more than creating in his essay Why Write?
by saying that more and more the writer thinks of himself as an instrument... to become less and
transmit more.(17) This is how writers help those on their paths to discovery. The most important trait
of a writer is that they do not instruct, but they convey ideas for their audiences to ponder. The writer is
someone who inspires their readers to look within themselves for answers and a conveyer of free
expression.