As culture evolves, it becomes ever more difficult to answer the question “What is art?” If you spill spaghetti sauce, is that a painting? Does a squeaky floor count as a song? If you say, “You, too,” when a T.S.A. agent says, “Safe travels,” is that a comedy-inflected performance piece?

Writing is among the art forms most difficult to define, most complicated to pin down, most synonym to yet another synonym. Fortunately, I have developed a helpful guide for the next time you find yourself asking, “Is the thing I have just done technically writing?” (Spoiler: the answer, almost always, is yes.)

• Writing is when you rearrange your pencils on a table until the café closes.

• Writing is when you sit—fingertips hovering over your keyboard, cursor blinking on a fresh blank document—and open Twitter for the twenty-eighth time.

• You can tell that someone is a writer because she’ll have a pencil behind her ear, a Moleskine notebook in her hand, a pen behind her other ear, coffee on her breath and shirt, eyes that beg for your approval, and a Sharpie she’s somehow hidden in her hair.

• You can also spot a writer by her creative intuition, her sense for how people will react in any given situation. She knows that, after she places her order, the barista will ask her to sign the receipt. She can predict who will say, “Thank you,” after she sneezes in public (no one). She can even tell how someone is feeling based solely off the grimace on his face.

• You officially become a writer when you own more than one laptop sticker. (If the first sticker is from a local NPR station, just the one will do.)

• Writing is inspired by everything which surrounds the writer. A coffee shop? The setting for a budding romance. An Uber Pool? The setting for a budding romance. The empty bus stop where someone graffitied a large penis? A great remote office in which to work on a romance novel.

• A key sign of writing is letters happening in a specific order. If you can read the letters, that’s prose. If the letters are a little jumbled, that’s poetry. If the letters are grouped in threes with other symbols, that’s actually a pay phone which, if you think about it, is kind of spoken-word writing.

• Writing by a man is called “art.” Writing by a woman is called “life-style blog.”

• Writing is when you have an idea for a book and then spend three decades telling people about that idea.

• If it makes you think and evaluate the world from a new perspective, it could be writing. If the person who made it is, like, “You wouldn’t get it,” then it’s definitely writing.

• Writing occurs any time someone uses the hashtag #writing. A hashtag of some kind must be used, or it does not count as writing. The Library of Congress is working to retroactively apply this rule to works such as #Hamlet, #WarandPeace, and the #Bible (alternative title: #Blessed).

• Reading is a key part of writing. The writer reassures herself this is true while skimming the Google results for “coffee make you more creative or yes.”

• Making lists of ideas, reading novels, scheduling time to sit down at your computer, researching new coffee shops at which to work, and establishing weekly word goals may seem like parts of writing, but they are not. They are procrastination, which, if you think about it, is actually writing in its purest form.