When I moved to Austin, I was surprised to learn that every guy and gal hanging out at a coffee shop was a novelist, every barista was sitting on a few truly outstanding, and unpublished, literary masterpieces, and everyone with a beard, a bike or a flowery skirt was either a great poet, the next Flannery O’Connor or the creator of the most amazing movie script in the history of scripts. It took me a week to figure out it was all bullshit. Then I learned that it’s even worse online. To help you figure it out faster, and to clarify things for all the “writers” out there, here’s a list of things that don’t make you a writer:

1. Owning a laptop.
2. Going to a coffee shop.
3. Owning a cat.
4. Putting the word author in your Twitter bio.
5. Drinking/talking about/enjoying coffee.
6. Living next to a university.
7. Hanging out with writers.