How is it that I became a writer?

It is my opinion that anybody can be a writer, I am not exactly sure that I just ‘became’ a writer just like that, but I have always enjoyed writing from a young age. There is a quote from Alice Munro in Margaret Atwood’s book; Negotiating With The Dead, where she believes that in order to be a reader, one must be a writer as well. For me, this is an apt summarisation of how I became a writer; as soon as I learned to read, I learned to write and put ideas down onto a blank page. Does this mean I became a writer the first time I wrote a coherent sentence? Or did I become a writer when I actually completed a full piece of writing that a reader could understand?  Having been asked to consider ‘how’ I actually became a writer, it has occurred to me that perhaps writing is not as exceptional a skill as I’d hoped. Being at university has fully challenged my ideas about the rules of writing and commencing this blog has made me doubt my capabilities of standing out as a writer. Anybody can have a blog about anything. What makes us think that we can make a difference with our writing? That is the key to becoming a writer; setting out to make a difference. And that is why I believe I became a writer: because I finally decided to write for others as well as for myself.