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Welcome to Day 9 of the Write the Story! writing challenge, writers!

I wonder, how do you feel referring to yourself as a writer? Or when someone else refers to you as a writer?

I have two teenage daughters and both are incredibly creative—they sketch digitally and in a sketchbook, one of them paints, one of them animates, and both love to write. But each is a bit uncertain when it comes to referring to herself as a writer. They see me as "more of a writer" than they are, but I tell them that is untrue.

If you are showing up at a keyboard or picking up a pen or pencil and sitting down to tell a story only you can tell, you are a writer. In fact, I believe we are all given a gift of creativity in various forms. That's one of the reasons I enjoy Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, so much; it speak directly to my writer heart & soul.

And that's why she's here again with another passage I hope will inspire and encourage you on your writing journey, not only today or this month, but for the long haul. This passage comes from a section titled, Stubborn Gladness:

I have chosen to believe that a desire to be creative was encoded into my DNA for reasons I will never know, and that creativity will not go away from me unless I forcibly kick it away, or poison it dead. Every molecule of my being has always pointed me toward this line of work—toward language, storytelling, research, narrative. If destiny didn’t want me to be a writer, I figure, then it shouldn’t have made me one. But it did make me one, and I’ve decided to meet that destiny with as much good cheer and as little drama as I can—because how I choose to handle myself as a writer is entirely my own choice. I can make my creativity into a killing field, or I can make it into a really interesting cabinet of curiosities.

I can even make it into an act of prayer.

I don't know about you, but I love her description of her creativity as a "really interesting cabinet of curiosities." But even more, I love that she says she can even make her creativity, or for me, my writing, into an act of prayer.

How beautiful is that?

Perhaps, as you consider your day, your time, your story, perhaps see your efforts as sacred. As an act of prayer. As a way of giving something back to the world and creating something that is bigger than you.

May the words your story needs find you as you settle into the act of creating something today!

Remember: drop your daily word count in the comments so we can track your daily word count and provide you a final total when we hit November 30.