By ClaireM., Niskayuna, NY

You are a writer if.............
The words “I bought a book” are as commonplace as “I brushed my teeth.”
You're in line at the grocery store and your thoughts are something along the lines of: “The dark-haired woman bent to inspect a pack of Dentyne gum, her beaky nose not seeming to diminish her confidence in the least.”
You get high from the smell of fresh paper.
Half your story is saved on your laptop, and the other half is written on the bottom of a Chinese takeout box.
You would end your lengthy feud with your neighbor, but the ongoing strife is food for a brilliantly scathing memoir.
Your life is in lists.
You read dictionaries and thesauruses like New York Times bestsellers.
You stay up all night to write an enlightening journal entry, even though you know no one will ever read a word of it.
You are a master prioritizer; you shove everything else aside to make time to write.
You have a habit of sniffing the pages of books before reading them.
With a pen and paper, you are supernatural.
You analyze the behavior of those you see on a daily basis for favorable character material.
Writing is what you do best, and you're terrible at it.
Your grocery lists are tangled with ­adjectives. “Blushing cherry tomatoes, stalwart zucchini, bread kneaded with ­passion ….”
The voice in your head says two things: “You call that writing?!” and “You call that writing?!”
You purposely toss paper and assorted junk about the room just so things look ­deliciously untidy.
You think a TV remote is for making phone calls.
You critique your childhood journals for consistency, plot flow, and rhythm.
You pause in the middle of a heated fracas and gasp, “Hold on – what was that word again? Anthropomorphized?”
You once used a leadless mechanical pencil to laboriously etch a new story idea into your trusty legal pad.
You call glasses “spectacles” and red “crimson.”
You believe writer's block should be classified as a terminal illness.
You laugh at random moments for no apparent reason.
You're never cold. You're frigid.
In a past life, you were probably a pencil.
You reached new levels of insanity thanks to the car alarm going off down the street.
You want your published work to be a smash-hit success, with ­oodles of popularity, but you also want it to retain its quiet aura of individuality.
If you had it your way, the next ruler of the universe would be Virginia Woolf or possibly Shakespeare.
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