I think one could substitute writers for editors in these scenes easily enough, and I think if one does, I identify more with the solitary writer than the non-solitary one. But I also think saying so oversimplifies the whole business.
In some ways this is a little strange to me; I started writing because I wanted to be alone. I grew up in a loud, loving-but-chaotic household, and writing took me someplace quiet, someplace I could think. I also think writing-as-a-group-activity can be taken to extremes; every so often I see a blogger who seems unable to write at all unless there are others on hand to say encouraging things on a daily or even hourly basis. Yet by the time I reached high school, writing had become much more collaborative for me, too. I passed work around to friends, or even wrote with them, taking turns moving pen across paper as we hashed out each line. The fact that other people loved writing as much as I did was a revelation and a joy. Then I decided–after college–to try to write for publication, and I found I needed to make a sort of tactical retreat: because I never actually finished anything when I wrote with others, and also because I needed to focus more, to work my way through this becoming-a-writer thing, to immerse myself in a silence deep enough that I could hear my own voice, and not anyone else’s. Besides, I didn’t actually know anyone who had or even who wanted to publish, so while I had writing friends, I didn’t really have writing peers, people who were in the same sort of trying-to-get-started place I was. Soon after my first sale–I lived in St. Louis at the time–I joined my first writer’s group; over the next two years I’m convinced learned more from them than I could have from any MFA program. I discovered I liked critique groups, for the friendship and support as much as the critiquing; I belong to two here in Tucson, too. And I’m married to a writer, too–which means a lot of day to day writing talk and writing camraderie. I think the NaMoWriMo crowd is right, in that sense; writing is more pleasant, and perhaps less depressing on the bad days, when there are folks who understand around you. Yet in the end, I still think writing is more solitary than not, at least for me. When I work on a story, I’m alone with it; I want to be alone with it; I need to be alone with it. I don’t really know how one can create with someone else constantly looking over their shoulder. No one knows my story as I do, not even those closest to me; no one can follow me to the place I go when I work on it, at least not all the way. Creation is solitary; yet writing, perhaps, is not. Because grateful as I am that I can slip into that alone-with-my-story place, I’m also grateful that there are others waiting, outside the story, when I emerge back into the non-story world; others who understand where I’ve been, even the places they go aren’t exactly the same ones. It’s a balance. Maybe where the balance is–where the solitary parts are, and where the community parts are–varies from writer to writer. We need to know how to be alone, or we can’t write; but we also need to know how to connect to others, or we’ll have little to write about.