Research: The Gateway Drug

Research is a gateway drug for procrastination. The secret to writing is putting new words on a page, not obssessively noodling with the words already there. On your first draft, make something up or put a pin in it and move on.

This year, I was a pedestrian walking alongside the freeway that is NaNoWriMo, and as I watched the authors whizzing past, ignoring my outstretched thumb, I noticed something... a lot of them stopped. Not for me, or because their book ran out of gas, but because they felt like they needed to know the number of bolts in the nosecone of an Ares rocket, or the exact color of the bed sheets in the Lincoln bedroom, or did Gladstone really have a Gladstone bag?

And all too many of them exited their novels, went up the steps into the library that is the internet... and never came back out.  And the few who did had trouble starting their novels again.

I'm a huge fan of libraries, both personal and public, and the Internet really is an amazing tool for researching your novel. Within easy reach of this chair, I can find the lineage of Galileo Galilei and detailed instructions on lock picking, plus everything in between.

But if I hit a section of my novel where I need to show Galileo's grandmother picking a lock, I don't reach for either of those books. Either I know it or I don't, and if I don't, I write "Galileo's Grandma picks lock." highlight it in yellow and/or append a footnote so I can find it again and move on.

Library: The Digital Evolution of An Iconic Space

Kinda strange and very cool.  It reminds me strongly of a lot of what goes on in Seattle's 'Experience Music Project'.

Intellectual Freedom

There's an unwritten contract between writer and reader. The author is here to challenge you, to hold up a mirror and show you what they see, a new viewpoint different from your own. It is in the nature of any reflection that we will not always see what we expect to see. At its worst it is merely titillating, but at its best this is the beginning of a conversation.

The juxtaposition of different viewpoints, one set beside the next, interlocking reflections of life in our times (or past times in some cases) adds depth and understanding because no single image can be the entire picture. In the words of the oft-censored author Douglas Adams: "The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough..."

Without the conversation, without seeing as much of the picture as is available to you, all the reflections available to you, you cannot hope to have a fully-realized picture of our culture. Pull the mirror off the wall and the reflection will go away but it will not change what it showed. Only by taking all the images available -- even those we disagree with -- and overlaying them can we begin to see the whole interconnected collage of overlapping lives and loves and wonder that surrounds us. The whole of creation laid out before us in the stacks of the world library.

Last year, Judith Krug died, leaving behind a tradition of raising up those voices that others would silence. Ms Krug founded "Banned Books Week" from the aptly-named Office of Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association.

Art is supposed to be a challenge to your viewpoint. If all we ever read or hear are those voices which already agree with us, then we are stagnant and the conversation dies. And that... that would be truly tragic.

The Hall of Dangerous Ideas includes the likes ofL Geoffery Chaucer, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger, the Christina Bible, the Quran and the US Constitution. These are the dangers when we allow someone else to decide what we can read.  Some of the greatest minds and influential works ever to pass from pen to page have all been censored, blocked, burned and banned.  And through it all, the real literary heroes have been the librarians who stepped in front of the censors and said "Not on my watch".

UPenn offers the following list of banned literature: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html.

Find out more and get your own free unplugged robot bookmark downloads from The American Library Association (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom.

Banned Books Week Starts Tomorrow

A library with empty shelves

NPR: Stanford Ushers In the Age of Bookless Libraries

My week in review...

Last week was National Library Week. A belated happy NLW to all my librarian friends out there (and for good measure, those I haven't met yet but I'm sure will be my friend if ever we do meet). I hope Neil Gaiman behaved himself, or at least misbehaved in an interesting manner.


In related news, I didn't set foot in a library (including the one I work in) all week. Why? Stomach flu. Terrible, awful, very bad, no good stomach flu. If someone offers it to you, thank them and politely refuse.  Or better yet, club them over the head and run away.

Which also explains why I've been scarce the past week or so and grumpy when I was here.  Sorry about that.  I've been working on my novel by writing longhand because fever and typing don't mix well for me.

So this week has become all about transferring the things I wrote in my notebook into my netbook and catching up on social duties and yes, blogging.  Also, I must sift through the ideas I jotted down in a feverish daze (as I tend to do) and figure out either what the scrawls mean and/or whether they're as clever as they seemed at the time.  Best of the bunch has to be to refit one of my old typewriters to double as a keyboard... or at least has an ersatz keylogger in place, giving me the tactile relationship with my writing that I crave but also negating the need to retype the thing into a computer later. 

I have my best research team (aka my Facebook friends list) hashing this out as we speak.


Otherwise, blogging returns as usual tomorrow!  And I have a lot of writing (and transcribing) to do so I should get back to it.  Happy Tuesday, everyone!

Spring Cleaning (Or Not...)

So, I read the New York Times almost every morning as part of my daily ritual of going through the rooms and corridors of my brain, flipping switches and powering-up the machinery.  (There's also some coffee involved.)  And sometimes I don't like what I read.  Sometimes it forces me to think about stuff I'd just as soon ignore.

The problem with "thinking too much" (a fault I've often been accused of) is that sometimes you think about something awful, something you never EVER want to think about.  And the friggin New York Times has a reputation for 'asking those tough questions' which often translates into 'making us think about the things we want to ignore'.

And now those rotten jerks did it again.  I've tried to ignore the story but it keeps cropping up in the lower corner.  They. Just.  Won't.  Let. It.  Rest.

Well, it's Easter morning and one of the rites of spring is supposed to be cleaning and getting your house in order.  So I guess it's high time I dealt with this uncomfortable subject.  Confronted those shadowy corners of my subconscious...

Those jerks at the New York Times posited that one might actually want to... much less actually have to... (deep breath) occasionally get rid of some books.  Those sick, awful journalists asked a bunch of authors about culling their personal libraries and what books they absolutely could not part with.

The horror!

So in the event of a library fire -- assuming the safety of loved ones, pets, irreplaceable antiques, photos and the family Bible -- what do you grab on the way out the door?

I suppose that it would too ironic to grab A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes ode to book collecting, or Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, though I re-read both of them all the time.  I have some signed first editions that would not be so easily replaced and some children's books both antique and modern that I adore and someday hope to share.  Poe and Tolkien and Conan Doyle all have their place on the tops of my lists as do the more modern voices of Zalazny, Chabon, Eggers, Newson, Lehane and Gaiman...  but any of those could still be replaced at your local bookstore.

The book that taught me most has to have been my Complete Works of William Shakespeare. No library should be considered complete without it and there is precious little about storytelling that you cannot learn from those hallowed pages.  But my Riverside Shakespeare can be replaced at any used bookstore and anyway, it's too easy.

And by the bye, anyone who tops their desert island list with Robinson Caruso should be horsewhipped on principle (I'm sure Defoe would back me on that).  Anyone who doesn't top that list with a stack of survival guides probably isn't going to live long enough to sit back and enjoy reading Ulysses while sipping homemade rum from a hollow coconut.

So what would I grab?  Doesn't my hypothetical library have a fire extinguisher?

Maybe a better way to tackle this is the way they did, as a meditation on spring cleaning.  What books could I - at least theoretically - do without?

The home improvement books would free up a shelf or two and in digital formats dictionaries are easier to handle, if less satisfying on a tactile level.  I have a lot of detective novels and miscellaneous paperbacks that I'll probably never read again.  My wife and I have been going through those and slowly donating them or shipping them off to good homes where they'll have a second life.

No.  I give up.  This is too hard.
Bring me a fire extinguisher and call the fire brigade, I'm going in...

Books We Can't Part With

Published: December 27, 2009

Six authors read favorite passages from books they would never discard. What would you throw out and what you would keep?

A Library on the hoof...

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of libraries and librarians.  This one inspires me even more than most.  Featured in the New York Times back in 2008, the famed Biblioburros of Columbia in a documentary by Ayoka Productions...

The thought it suggests...

Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom."
             - Prospero, The Tempest

The past few years, I've been slowly remodeling my home.  Inside and out, we've been taking this 70's rambler and giving it the touches that make it immediately apparent who lives there.  Naturally, we started with a library.  Two entire walls of this garage conversion are hidden behind books.  I even closed up a window in one wall to make yet more room for bookshelves and still I find that I'll need more before the year is out.  It is a wonderful problem to have, really.

One of the things that saddens me about the incipient 'revolution' of e-Publishing is that the library will fade from our homes.  That I will no longer be able to take the first measure of a person I am visiting by a quick perusal of their reading habits.  Our habits, our beloved and well-thumbed books and our aspirational texts all whisper a story about us, and when combined speak volumes ahead of a word of introduction being spoken.

In the future do I ask to see someone's Kindle when I walk into their home?

The poet John Whittier said something about a book being not so much the thought it contains, but the thought it suggests.  By its presence, a book is an implication that it has been read and appreciated.

As much as that troubles me, both culturally and aesthetically, what bothers me most is the moving target.  Because what is a book these days?  Is it a tangible thing of pasteboard and paper, leather and thread, buckram and glue?  Is it merely the delivery device for it contents?  Or is a fragile net of words by which we are able to capture our dreams and ideas to share them with others?  The thought it contains, or the thought it suggests?

And more importantly, are the two indivisible?

For centuries, the bookshelves of our homes have been the symbol of our literacy, a glimpse inside our minds and hearts for our visitors and a personal repository of all our intellectual aspirations.  Will a world where my reading habits are no longer immediately apparent to those sitting next to us on the plane or visiting my home be a world that inspires me to read more or less?

Reading is a public act and it always has been.  In the spines we spot in waiting rooms and airport terminals as much as the spines we peruse on the shelves of our friends' homes, we find one another and yes, we also judge one another.  I cannot claim innocence here.  What I see you reading makes an indelible impression upon me.  Whether or not I see you reading makes even more of an impression.  From the books I peruse on your shelves I am putting together my mental impression of you and how you think.

I would like to say that taking reading out of the public realm will mean we will no longer be judgmental because the innocuous plastic case of your e-Reader will conceal from the world at large whether you are reading Seneca or Silence of the Lambs, Tennyson or Twilight.  But the fact is, that once we strip away that last vestige of public evidence that actually reflects the contents of our mind and character, then our appearance will be all the remains for the world to judge us by.


I, for one, would rather be judged on my mind.

Home libraries are and always have been more than just a room to hold our books.  Most book collectors aspire to the look and feel of the libraries of our imaginations as much as we aspire to own the books we love.  Books that have been put up on the wall simply for the sake of making the homeowner look more erudite than they are is not new.  Seneca the Younger complains about it and he was writing around 54 AD. But when the bulk of our written culture is delivered digitally, buying books becomes a more conscious act both for better and worse.  And displaying books in your home becomes ever more and more a choice of ostentatious display and a decision made by the decorator akin to hanging a painting rather than the display of beloved words by an avid booklover.

Or maybe I just worry too much.

Referenced

I can pick a lock or repair a watch.  I can conduct surgeries, examine corpses for forensic evidence, bind a book, dress a deer, identify or concoct poisons, and reproduce Lord Nelson's flagship down to the last knot and nail.  If necessary, I can also conduct a Latin Mass, reproduce the scripts of Carolingian scribes, shoe a horse, summon Cthulhu, or swear like a WWII soldier.  I can walk the streets of forgotten cities in lost kingdoms and navigate the alleys of Calcutta in the year 2010.  And I can do it all from the safety and convenience of my writing chair.

Some of these things I can do because I'm weird that way.  For the rest of it, I have reference books.

If there are any writers who don't have a personal library of research materials, I haven't met them yet.  If you want to be a writer, I swear that the first order of business is to nail down a handy and reliable source of research material.  Whether it's a colonnaded building built with a Carnegie grant or an impressive list of websites and online journals or a room in your house (apartment, condo, whatever) an eccentric collection of research materials grows as a result of the curiosity that made you become a writer in the first place

I never studied medicine but one of my main characters in the last novel I wrote was an MD.  I could go online, of course, and get a lot of information and some of it would even be accurate.  But far better for me to be able to reach over and pulling my Manual of Surgery or PDR, or Mosby's Manual of Diagnostic Tests off the shelf and getting on with the writing.

For most writers I know, research is our drug of choice.  Putting a slumgullion of random yet curiously interrelated websites and blogs at my fingertips just ups the danger of losing my workday down the rabbit hole.  I can spend hours hopping from topic to topic, following a chain of links down a questionable path of lies and truth spun together into a strange blend that even William Gibson's Neuromancer failed to adequately predict.  How easy it is to get lost on the information superhighway, tumbling in the slipstream of bits and bytes as I bounce from website to website, digging up one quirky fact after another like a hyperactive two year old shoveling candy into his mouth.

Far better to bind my search between boards.  Paper is safer and there are no pop-up ads or viruses.

Your public library is a good start and will always and forever supplement your home library.  In fact, the aspiring writer needs to first and foremost make friends with the reference librarians at their local branch library.  A first name basis is best, and you might even want to learn how to bake their favorite cookie because odds are good that you're going to put their library sciences degree to work.  You're going to be the story they tell around the supper table that night when they get home; embrace the fact. 

"So that writer guy Scott came in again today and asked me to help him calculate the amount of whalebone harvested by Basque whaling fleets before 1610."   The answer is approximately 24 million pieces.  Academic libraries are the best and if it wasn't for the able assistance of Becky, Kendall and Rachel, I would never have discovered the various academic journals that allowed me to piece that together.

Which reminds me.  I need to bake some snickerdoodles.

Even straight literature requires at least a modicum of research.  One story idea I'm developing would feature nary a single mysterious element or unexplained death.  But it still required me to pick up an old pocket watch repair manual and another on the history of the American athletic shoe industry.  In any story, for any market, it is the job of the writer to create the verisimilitude of background and character that allows you to accept the setting and concentrate on the story.  Unless you are an acknowledged expert in every field your writing will touch on or uncommonly skilled at lying... you're going to need some help at some point.

I'm not suggesting that you have to become a Crichton or Clancy, but it's important to get stuff right or know how to lie convincingly.  I swear that half of fiction writing is getting a feel for when you have to know what you're talking about and when I can make stuff up.  (Yes, we lie to you all the time; the sign overhead in the bookstore says 'fiction' for a reason.)

My dad taught me that a personal library largely exists to supplement the public libraries I frequent.  Duplicate books you want to collect, but save your money if you're not filling the gaps.  It has since grown to encompass books that I reference often enough that I don't want need to get in the car to go consult them.  My dad wasn't a writer, but it's worth noting that at his funeral, the local librarians were among the mourners.

"I like books. I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get in their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Buy the books you need to touch more than once a  week.  The collection will grow of its own accord, so devote some space to the books you love and the books you need.  Cicero said that to add a library to your home was to give it a soul.   Your relationships with your books and those who purvey them will extend that feeling to your words, imbuing them with soul as well.