Just a thought, reading your comment. A 'writer' is someone who 'writes' so there is no issue with identifying as such; you can write silly or profound things.

Just a thought, reading your comment. A 'writer' is someone who 'writes' so there is no issue with identifying as such; you can write silly or profound things. However in French there is a specific word for a book writer, 'écrivain', whereas there is no word corresponding to 'writer', 'écriveur' is a derisive term to explicitly convey the idea that one is a writer that is not an artist. So that trick wouldn't be possible in French. So my theory is that if there is a dedicated word for the highest status activity, that word tends to naturally accumulate all semantic layers that artistic activities do. But even in English, visual arts tend to just be 'art'. You can be a 'painter', but if you don't paint then there isn't really any word, unless you identify as a drawer.