Last week’s assignment was to shut off the computer and get yourself to a library. I’ve had a thing for libraries for almost as long as I’ve had a thing for books, which is a long time now. I feel like a kid in a candy store… so many books, so little time. If you’re a reader, there’s no better place on Earth.
And if you’re going to write, there’s really no way to overestimate the value of reading. That may seem too obvious to even bear stating, but it’s not something to take for granted. More than once I’ve spoken to writers who claim they don’t like to read.
What the…?
As writers, and as people, we don’t evolve in a vacuum. It’s not as though it’s impossible to write without reading, but in the absence of others’ writing, yours ends up impoverished, at best. We learn to write in much the same way we learn to speak, by observing what others have to say and by sometimes awkwardly imitating that ’til we’ve had enough practice with it to develop a voice of our own. So writing without reading is like sitting at a party with your fingers in your ears; the conversation could be very lively and stimulating, but you’re just not having it.
So libraries are a reader’s and writer’s paradise, in ways that the internet and even Kindle can’t touch. They’re also great for research in ways that the web tends not to be. You can find things online more quickly and easily sometimes than you would in a library, but libraries have better accidents. Since that last sentence probably doesn’t make a bit of sense taken at face value, let me explain.
Let’s say you’re writing about something, or just researching in order to find something on which to write. If you Google the subject, you’ll probably find tons of hits. If I Google “fireworks,” for instance, I’ll get somewhere over 56 million hits. I can then narrow those results by adding more search terms (“fireworks displays” cuts those results to about 580,00, and “fireworks displays New York harbor” cuts them further still, to about 44,000).
There’s two problems here. The first is that even though you’ve cut your search results down to a fraction of a percent of the original, nobody’s going to have the time or patience to wade through 44,000 items. The second, which goes more or less without saying, is that not all of those 44,000 will be of the same utility or authority. For example, if you Google “fireworks displays New York harbor” now, you’d probably get 44,001 hits, this post among them. And it probably wouldn’t be the one you were looking for. If that’s you, and you’ve read this far, my apologies.
Libraries take that enormous sea of information and condense it to a size that we can manage a bit more easily. They’re a great first step for research for the simple fact that you can learn about a subject in sufficient depth to know what it is you’re looking for by the time you start to look for it online.
Then there’s those accidents. Somewhere in the aforementioned 44,000 results I mentioned a little while back, there will be some things that’re only tangentally related to what you were looking for when you entered those search terms. Among those results will probably be no less than 100 sites offering illegal mp3 downloads, a handful of websites or blogs written in another language, and about 4,000 porn sites (that last is a pretty conservative estimate). It’s hard enough to sift through a dung heap looking for gold nuggets; it’s harder still to separate out the occasional diamond that may have snuck in there. But let’s say you’re in the library looking for something on World War II. So you’re going through the stacks, and you’re likely to find something on the Spanish Civil War. Or you might get distracted on the way there by a book of poetry, an anthology of essays, a cookbook, or the biography of some actor or another. Look for a work of fiction, and you’re likely to find something by another author you’ve been told was great but never had the chance to check out. Unlike Amazon, which will give you a series of reviews ranging from pithy to just plain pissy, the library affords you the chance to read the darned thing, rather than just reading about it. Imagine that. Like the party, you never know what, or who, you’ll run into.
And libraries are social places, in their own quiet way. You can pick up tips, information, book reviews, and other things on the fly in ways that would take a lot more effort online. You can come to a single site that combines more things than most online venues would dare to put under one roof. And if you’re suffering from withdrawals, don’t worry. They’ve got computers and internet there, too.