By Paul Cumin

 

“You got your firewood in yet?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Maybe we should work together.”

“What?”

“Maybe we should collaborate.”

“Good idea. Okay.”

There’s no question that some activities are best done with others – like operating a chainsaw in a remote forest. True, there is an “I” in firewood but there’s also one in “Oh dear my arm has been severed now where’s that tourniquet?”

Other activities are better done solo. The Birkenhead River, for example, has some stretches of truly sublime fishing and if several of you ever want to join me there I’d prefer the chainsaw and tourniquet scenario.photo PCumin.PNG

Writing, it seems to me, belongs in the latter category. It’s best done alone. Too many hands make light of the fact that writing is hard, solitary work.

Most readers of this blog are, like me, wannabe writers, and so are, like me, staring at this screen as a way of avoiding the lonesome and difficult work of actually writing. Normal people would call this procrastination but we are wordsmiths – aspiring – and so we are alert to the fact that “procrastination” strokes the ear with all the finesse of a drunken lumberjack. The word is just “pro” in front of “crass” followed by “nation” as if its citizens are all better-than-amateur social boors.

Writers are too fond of earfeel for a word like procrastination and, understandably, are also keen to appear not-lazy. So, like any mysterious and marginalized group, writers have developed an alternative grammar. This serves at least two purposes: (1) it preserves the group’s mystique and, (2) it conceals and justifies its bad habits. Writers are adept at this. Members may speak of procrastination within the group but to the listening world the term is replaced with “research,” “creative break,” and “collaboration.”

As a result, those who aren’t yet but really want to be writers are easily persuaded that more collaboration is a sure-fire way to invoke their muse. I know this from personal experience. Writers who are already writers, on the other hand, tend to eschew distraction of any kind, whether from mythic nymphs or other humans. I know this from observation and from personal experience as an other human.

So, if you want to be a real writer, don’t procrastinate or collaborate. Go alone into the bush with your chainsaw already running. Just start ‘er up and go now, don’t delay. Cut down trees, sever limbs, bleed, listen to the birds, feel the pain, smell the gore and use the blood for ink.

And if you’re headed out there and have already bought your tickets to the Whistler Readers’ and Writers’ Festival, please allow me to take them off your hands/hand(?). You are clearly above the need for collaboration but I for one could use the help.

Paul Cumin is a family man and a fly-fisher.
He is the pastor at the community church in Pemberton.