If an acquaintance asks, "And what do you do ?" we don't go into a long discussion of how freelancing works. We simply say, "I'm a writer." But are you a writer when you are not writing? I have a dilemma on that score. I stopped writing for a living four years ago, but if you woke me in the middle of the night and asked me that same question, I would automatically say, "I'm a writer."

Sometimes I feel guilty about that, as if I am stealing a former identity. Then I decide that the difference is merely quantitative, not qualitative -- just that when I was writing, I was also not writing some of the time while nowadays, I'm not writing all of the time. So, if you can rationalize as well as I can, it's just a matter of how much not writing you do.

During the recent screenwriters' strike against the Hollywood studios, a veteran screenwriter, Rob Long, wrote this in the Los Angeles Times: "As a professional writer, not writing is one of my chief skills. I can not write anywhere, and I often feel that a day spent without not writing is a day wasted." Since, by Writers Guild of America rules, striking screenwriters are not allowed to write anything, Long felt trapped: "When I think of writing," he wrote, "pretty much what comes to mind is sitting around drinking a latte and checking my e-mail every seven seconds. If there's a strike, am I still allowed to do that?"

The question is much trickier for ASJA members -- can we actually tell the difference between the times we are writing and some of the times when we are not? Most freelancers, I think, find it hard to draw the often fuzzy, almost mystical distinction. Some years ago, for example, a friend and fellow writer told me how he'd been sitting in his upstairs office working on a story when his wife called from downstairs to ask him to come down and help her with something. He did, but then asked why she had interrupted him when he was writing.

"But you weren't writing," she said. "I didn't hear the typewriter going."

"I was thinking!" he said.

"But you weren't writing," she pointed out.

"I was thinking about what I was going to write," he said, barely controlling his exasperation.

"Well," she said, "as far as I'm concerned, sitting there looking at a piece of paper isn't writing." (Not surprisingly, they got divorced a few years later.)

Sad but true, that sort of domestic drama happens more often than you might think.

When my sons were youngsters, they would innocently interrupt me at work for no good reason, or play noisily right outside my office door, in the belief that Daddy -- who was at that moment going through hell trying to come up with a good lead -- was just simply sitting at his desk looking out the window.

I eventually learned that the simplest way to stop such behavior was to grimace fiercely and shout, "Be quiet! I'm writing!" whether I was actually writing or not.

That worked like magic with the kids, but you can't yell at people who think it's okay to phone you, or drop in to chat, because you're home and probably not writing anything, anyway.

It gets very mixed up, this business about writing but not writing at the same time. I'm mixed up right now, because I have been not writing for several years, yet I always seem to be writing something for Barbara DeMarco-Barrett.

Norman Lobsenz is an award-winning writer with 20 books to his credit and over 1,000 articles published in national magazines. He is a founding member of ASJA (then called the Society of Magazine Writers) and was its president in 1965. In 1993, he received ASJA's Career Achievement Award.