The two aren’t the same. Writers are lucky to get published. By definition, an author is someone who, yes, is being published. Yet being an author doesn’t make anyone a writer, if by writer one means someone who has well-honed skill with, or heaven-bestowed gift for, written language. In fact, most authors aren’t natural writers and are challenged when it comes to writing well. They try, but they don’t succeed, and it simply isn’t expected of them, nor is it the point of publishing them. They’re people with deep knowledge of their field who have something new to to say about it. So they generate a mscript, trying their best, and much of the time, the result is weak. Sometimes the problem is language barriers (they grew up speaking another language), sometimes it’s a faulty education system, sometimes they simply have never had to read themselves, so how would they know how bad they are? Whatever the reason, they don’t have the skill and haven’t had sufficient chance or motivation to acquire it.
Most authors realize that writing isn’t their strong point. Then others don’t realize it, and you run into turbulence when working on their mscripts, because they don’t want to be told – or shown, by all the changes you’ve made – that they don’t know how weak their writing is.
The difference between an author and a writer is much the same as between talking and singing, or walking and dancing. The first is innate and needs little development beyond growing up, the second requires training and practice, as well as some sort of gift. In all the years, I’ve run into two authors who really did have that. The first was a fine arts professor, writing a book about Renaissance painters. I called the ME after a few days with the mscript, and it was as if he already knew what I was going to say. “Yes,” he said. “Amazing, isn’t he?” As I mentioned before, it was about sound and cadence, and this person had more grasp of both than any other author I’ve encountered, and it was immediately clear that he did.
The second author was a first-timer writing a book about Native rights, and this one almost broke my heart, because she didn’t know how good she was, and I couldn’t convince her of it. It was a Native studies mscript, thoroughly researched, with all the apparatus (notes/biblio) you would expect, but she had grown up in the area she was writing about in the time and place where the events unfolded, so she was also serving as an eyewitness. As mentioned, she didn’t seem to realize know what she had – how good an ear for language (its sound and cadences), how strong a narrative drive, how tight a grasp of structure, both micro and macro. “Are you writing another book?,” I asked her. No, she told me, she was going to law school next. “You shouldn’t stop with this,” I told her. “Write this one again, or do a follow-up. You really should.” No, she said, it wasn’t in the cards she’d dealt herself. I hope she’s a wonderful lawyer.