I’ll probably rename the thread to “What are you writing” which is more neutral and more in line what my personal purpose for this thread was… (I don’t always know what I want when I first write the words, but editing is part of writing, isn’t it?)
I always felt that the original idea behind NaNoWriMo was to get young people to write. In a couple of years, I will probably introduce our friends’ daughter to it. She’s on her third attempt to write a novel at 12 years old 
And I read the first few pages she wrote for the last one: better than whatever I wrote at that age. I don’t remember the details but I was impressed.
Almost all of us have the basic skill and the basic tools for writing. And I agree that with the advent of the internet and in particular self-publishing, the lines between the professional and the amateur are blurring, the role of publishers as gatekeepers has diminished.
The Zeitgeist is propagating this mindset of “with the right idea, you’ll make it big and if not that is your failure”. And this is not confined to writing. Coupled with some highly visible uber-successful authors who did make it big, this gives people the idea that they can do it, too. That it is only an extremely small minority in every field who become that sucessful is rarely mentioned.
Here the bonus words... ;)
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who had three hobbies. She was in elementary school when she got her first camera, she liked math for the great puzzles and she liked reading so much she wanted to write her own stories. People always asked her what do she wanted to be when she grew up? She couldn’t be a princess–though that sounded tempting–so she said she wanted to be a math teacher because she had no idea one could be a photographer and she had already been told that writing was “brotlose Kunst” (aka a starving art). Eventually, she encountered computers and found out that it was possible to automate the finding of solutions to math puzzles and because she was a lazy girl, she was hooked. Because she thought that if she could only automate enough, she wouldn’t have to work at all (and could play boardgames all day instead).
In my day-job I am a software developer. Everyone can learn programming, you start with robo-ralleye (just kidding) move on to games like Opus Magnum (less kidding) and before you know it you have written your own javascript sorting algorithm…
But working as a software developer requires a little more than just knowing a programming language. I studied computer science for 7 years at university. What I learned there, I mostly forgot. Tons of math. But what stuck with me were tools and methods to work myself into problems to analyze them. And then I started working, found out I knew nothing of how to apply my knowledge and it took me another 7 years of working in the field to become someone I can confidently say knows software development. So from learning my first programming language around 1990 it took me around 20 years to learn the craft. And still I am ways and ways and ways off from the geniuses in this business. Also I completely stopped programming for fun once it became a profession. I do write code privately but very very rarely. And everyone can put up their code on github btw. It’s the kdp of programmers.
Long before I ever knew such a thing as programming existed, I had an interest in photography. And ever since I got my first digital camera I have been able to take that hobby to a new level. For many years, I uploaded a lot of my pictures to Flickr with a creative commons license and shared them in a variety of groups and a few of my pictures made it into wikipedia, into articles, album covers, books and whatnot and I am proud I was able to contribute these (especially wikipedia). And I have a friend who made this particular hobby into a job… I only very briefly entertained the idea because I like landscape photography not portraits and I am not a natgeo photographer. I like the pictures as visual memories more than I want to do this every day… but I can talk with my photographer friend about lenses, cameras, lighting and all these details because I know a bit or two about the craft. I’ll forever be an amateur with no ambition to go beyond that.
Now writing. It’s a long held dream of mine to be a writer not of code but words (it’s been up there in my bio since day one but the dream is far older). I’ve spent years now trying to learn to be better at that and I am with those who say to become a writer you need to write a million words. I started writing fiction around 2013 again. Since then I have written something between 350.000 and 400.000 words. So there is still some ways to go. My goal is to reach beyond the amateur level, which doesn’t mean I’ll make it there–in fact I think it is highly unrealistic. But every time I notice that I have taken a step forward in my writing (this time the outline) it gives me a little jolt of happiness at seeing that I am making progress. And maybe one day I’ll write something that people will think worth reading.
TL;DR: So many words… to say: there is a difference between doing something professionally and at amateur level and yet both are valid and one can go from amateur to professional with enough dedication and maybe an ounce of talent or two. But as said above, I dislike when people come to have unrealistic expectations through the influence of those who should know better.