He's not a writer.

That's the distinction with which everyone is being bogged down.

George R. R. Martin is a storyteller. There's a difference. Stephen King is a writer. Michael Crichton was a writer.

Crichton summed up what it is to be a writer in the most simplistic and eloquent-in-its-brevity language I think I've ever heard: "If you're going to be a writer, then you have to write. You have to wake up every day and sit down and write. Can you imagine if a pilot woke up one morning and said, 'I don't feel like flying the plane today.'"