Living in the Library

By Allison K Williams

The view from my desk

As a kid, I loved wandering the shelves, able to take out as many books as I was years old, a mom rule instituted after a frantic hunt for Book #21, eventually located under the mattress, probably stashed while flashlight-reading under the covers. I learned the habit of finding an author I liked and reading everything they’d written. E. L. Konigsburg, Joan Aiken, Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown solve-it-yourself mysteries, J.D. Fitzgerald’s Great Brain series, and of course Betty MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and her magical cures for brats and bad manners. Mom cheerfully checked out Eloise books from the Adult Section for me, and around middle school I discovered Dorothy Gilman, M.E. Kerr, Cynthia Voigt and Robert Cormier.

If we were still there near closing time, I looked for hiding places, thinking how I could squeeze behind a tall shelf or hide under the big card catalog, and prowl the library all night–no misdeeds intended, just the joy of being surrounded by so many books, connecting to them alone.

Some libraries have sleepover nights now, but I never got one as a kid. So when I ended up with a spare week after the Craft & Publishing Voyage on the Queen Mary 2, along with a full manuscript request for a book that…um…wasn’t done? OK, was only half-written, but they liked the pitch–I thought of Gladstone’s.

William Ewart Gladstone was a four-time Prime Minister of Great Britain and a Victorian statesman. He also loooooooved books, writing, “Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books–even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.”

Oh yes, Mr. Gladstone. Oh yes, they do.

Gladstone built his book collection from childhood, and in his later years, considered his legacy. As the library’s website says,

“Often pondering,” he wrote his daughter, Mary Drew, “how to bring together readers who had no books and books who had no readers, gradually the thought evolved itself in his mind into a plan for the permanent disposal of his library. A country home for the purposes of study and research, for the pursuit of divine learning, a centre of religious life.”

William Gladstone saw that the books classified as divinity and humanity would be of great value to members of all Christian denominations but he also wished students from other faiths, or none, to have equal access to them. Such potential readers needed a place where they could stay and read with time to think and write in a scholarly environment.

In his eighties, he moved most of the 32,000+ books, with the help of his valet and his daughter, from his home to the newly built library. Mostly by wheelbarrow.

Now, Gladstone’s Library is Britain’s finest residential library. Anyone can stay in comfortable, not-too-spartan rooms, for about $140-170/night with breakfast, with discounts for students, members of the Society of Authors, and clergy.

I drove four hours from Heathrow to North Wales and checked in. After four weeks of event planning, event management, teaching, author coaching, editing and traveling with 48 people, it took three days to calm down enough to be able to write anything. I did laundry. I walked. I edited short projects, caught up on email and logged receipts.

But I also kept thinking about my book. I worked on a structure diagram, listing scenes and showing on paper their tension level, location, change in the characters, whether a twist would shock or a reveal would enlighten. I tweaked the first 35,000 words, getting back in touch with the draft I’d been writing for six years, and let sit six months ago.

When I felt like I had something to say, I claimed a desk in the pindrop-silent library, some days on the ground floor, looking out a window at green Wales, some days in the gallery, looking into the library full of other writers and scholars and local university students, all of us tap-tap-tapping away. I spoke to almost no-one. I barely made eye contact with other humans. I felt the truth of Gladstone’s words,

Books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of man. They are in a certain sense at enmity with the world. … In a room well filled with them, no one has felt or can feel solitary.

I had a day where I tidied my things and slowly exercised and wondered whether I was really a writer at all. I had a day where I wandered to a neighboring pub and did quiz night all by myself with a cup of cocoa. (The fruit with the most calories? Two elements with X in the name? Number of letters in the full name of Llanfair P.G, the Welsh town with the longest name in the world?)

I told myself I wasn’t wasting my time. Or my money. I edited some Brevity blogs. I wrote an overdue outline for another book and sent it to my long-waiting publishers. And I kept showing up at the page, patiently, waiting for the answer, making it clear I was ready to receive.

On my second-last day, I finished the structure diagram and found the missing piece, a key moment needing to be written that solved the plot problem I’d been stuck on, showed a big, needed character change, and made me excited about writing again.

It’s OK that it took a week, and cost money. Because I wouldn’t have had that focus elsewhere. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to say, “my work matters, and it’s OK to press pause on work for other people.”

Not all of us have the available time, or the spare cash. And that’s the challenge. How do we make time for retreat when we can, in the circumstances we have? How do we make the most of that time, even if “making the most” isn’t word count?

We do our best.

We ask for help.

And we remember that we are not alone, that we are part of a vast lineage of books, that our physical encounters with them are the embodiment of their spirit within us, the spirit we express in our own way, in our own time, in our own words.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity‘s Social Media Editor. Make virtual time for your own book with Project Novel, an eight-week revision course this summer. Applications close soon.