4 ~ Sunday, June 2, 1991 - North Shore News The futility of being TODAY’S rumination is on order. Bob Hunter * The subject comes to mind because f am in the midst of one of those periodic reorganizations of the office. As a writer, every time we move house, I move office. And some- times, like this time, even when we haven’t moved house, I still move office. My office in this house started out upstairs in che northeast cor- ner. For a variety of reasons, | have just shifted to a larger room on the southwest corner, still upstairs. Major trauma. Just moving down the hall. For a truly terrifying week or two, all my files are in disarray. STRICTLY PERSONAL Iam reminded of the poor crab, a tender, tasty creature that has to abandon its shell in order to grow. It actually squeezes out of its armor and faces the hostile outer world, utterly vulnerable, until it can grow a new, larger shell. This is what moving my office is like for me. I suspect this is true of all writers. | know people who make their living from writing who have literally not changed offices in their entire adult lives. Of course, not all writers call the room they work in an office Most of them probably call it a study or a studio, There's a big difference in the kind of writer you are, depending on whether you work in a study, a studio or office. [f a guy tells you he writes in his den, forget it. He doesn’t make a living from it, that’s for sure. The very best place to write — the classiest, bar none — is a cabin. Writers who go to cabins to work are serious. They are so serious they can’t be disturbed by other people. The nature of their work is so profoundly agonizing, requiring such awesome concentration on the inner stirrings of the soul, that they must be protected by miles of wilderness from other mental vibrations. This is the kind of writer who works according to nobody’s bio- rhythm except his own, writing all night, most likely, and sleeping through the days, although wak- ing up obsessed sometimes mere hours after having passed out from creative exhaustion. In contrast, a writer who thinks of his workspace as an office is not only unromantic and probably undeep, he’s very likely what is known in the trade as a hack. A hack is a guy who can come up with 1,000 words on any sub- ject inside an hour, He is unsen- timental. He accepts his cheque and moves smartly on to the next assignment. The guys who go to cabins are probing the mystery of the uni- verse through the process of their writing. Guys who get up and just go to their office aren’t trying to do that. They’re just doing a job. They’re communicating, not ex- ploring the beyond. And to communicate, you’ve got to have something to pass along. Some nugget of informa- tion. Some rumor. Some wild idea. Some bloody piece of data. This is where the files come in. The nice, fat orderly files. Files are one of the great no- tions of all time. The filing cabi- net itself ranks up there with the rubber boot, the printing press, painless dentistry and the 747. The files — let us get right down to this -- are order incar- nate. Yet files are one thing writers hardly ever mention. I think it has to do with the fact that we like to pretend all those figures we keep znentioning, those dates, those names and titles and exotic loca- tions, those wonderful statistics and poll results, are held firmly in mind at all times. fileless Frankly, if | didn’t have files, I'd be dead meat. As part of the change of office this time, we picked up some in- dustrial-strength files, legal-size, horizontaliy-built. This will be the best filing system I’ve ever had. But there are a couple of parts missing from the cabinet, and the updating and reorganizing of the files has taken longer than ex- pected, due to the pressure of events. And, thus, the naked little crab-being/writer is trembling out here in the cold, surrounded by disorder. It’s an awful thing, being tleless or Planet Earth in the dy- ing decade of the 20th century, with so much going on, and no way to keep track except to keep reading, keep marking stories, keep clipping, keep filing. Some people maintain an illu- sion of order in their lives through the consistency of their opinions. Others through the layout of their gardens. Yet others do it by flipp- ing through amortization tables. Me, it’s the files. I'll sure be glad when they’re in place again. You'll be able to tell. I'll sound knowledgeable. I'll be throwing stats all over the place. [ll remember dates. I? know where places are, even how far it is be- tween them, and what the temperature was a million years ago. Pil throb with info. Data’ll drip from my word processor, It’lt be good. J look forward to it. Enor- mously. 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