Studio Blog

Hmm, what time is it? I thought so. This is taking too long.
 
Here I sit, waiting for brilliance to pull alongside me, third mug of coffee turning as arctic as my moribund brain cells. Tom Waits moans in the background, slurring the relentlessly optimistic lyrics of “Somewhere”—the Bernstein-Sondheim meditation on the redemptive power of love—into a dirge.
 
No, I’m not namedropping. Waits isn’t actually sitting at my elbow, poised to spike my cup of java with a shot of Wild Turkey (I can’t envision the ramshackle singer guzzling Johnny Walker Blue). It’s true I did meet him once, at a theater event where he offered me one of the beers he had secreted in the pockets of his forlorn overcoat. A story for another time, unless I want to continue stalling. Always a temptation.
 
I’m listening, of course, to a CD, part of the “soundtrack” I program each morning before beginning work. That music usually doubles as a muse, but inspiration refuses to arrive. Repeatedly, I look at the assignment. Not a single thought enters my head.
 
The assignment being for me to compose a blog on the culture of the CE community.
 
All the usual jumpstart tricks fail. I free-associate, and I cluster. I write the old-fashioned way, with pen and legal paper while employing my “opposite hand.” I switch from pen to goose quill to no avail. I put on sunglasses and pretend I’m Lady Gaga assembling her memoirs (don’t recoil, it’s only an exercise). Legal pad tossed aside, I try composing in cuneiform script on ancient parchment. Still nothing comes.
 
Nothing but panic. This is due within the hour.
 
Can’t be done, that’s the conclusion I reach, at least not by this reporter. The words won’t pour onto the page because no single culture exists within this community. Instead, we represent a collection of diverse cultures, experiences and perspectives, such a hodgepodge of biographies that the mind boggles at how magnificently this group functions as a team.
 
You want a culture? Okay, I’m ready to take a stab. Ours is a culture of perfectionism. We relentlessly hone, and that can be something of a curse. Most people can sit at home and read anything—a novel, an op-ed piece, a comic book, the ingredients on the back of a cereal box—and accept it for what is. We rarely can peruse any form of written material, including works by professionals of the highest reputations, without finding some flaw, without mentally rearranging the order of a phrase or a passage, or revising the words entirely to serve the perceived intention of the writer. 
 
Our passion for excellence, that addictive longing to “get it right,” defines our culture as much as it defines us. Why else would we plant ourselves in front of these screens and obsessively squint at all those words upon words upon words, thousands of them daily, until they start to blur?
 
Chalk it up to love, love of language, love of elegant phrasing, and an overpowering lust for clarity. And it is that last, this devotion to clear expression, that makes this intermittently tedious but exhilarating vocation so valuable, so ultimately rewarding.
 
We do nothing less than teach the world how to communicate, and we should never forget what a noble enterprise this represents. When we mentor writers through our detailed notes, we help them to reveal themselves, their hopes, their needs, their fears, their secrets, the things they know. We help them to find the words to tell us who they are. We create an atmosphere conducive to the compassion that engenders respect, and we facilitate the flow of ideas. We elevate the human spirit.
 
We teach people how to push nouns against verbs to topple the illusion that we are irreconcilably different from one another. Our culture—whatever that word means to you—promotes and enhances the exchange of feelings and opinions, an ongoing communication in which we can learn that there is more that unites us than divides us, that ambition in different guises, our glorious human frailties and strengths, and our simple need to be heard and understood, to emotionally touch and be touched, serve as common bonds. Ultimately, we recognize how we share everything with everybody.
 
And you thought we were just editing.