What I'm writing about

I've written a lot in this blog about the process of writing. Today I want to shift gears and write about content. I am deep into chapter 2 of The Book, in which I reconsider the legacy of library services to children. I needed some kind of organizing principle to do this, and I settled on the identification of three sets of principles or themes.

The first set of five principles are the values and ideas that have come down through more than a hundred years of library service to children. I proposed that these principles are:

1. Reading good books contributes to a good life.
2. The individual child is the primary user of children's library services.
3. The library's children's room is an important element in promoting reading.
4. Children's librarians are the appropriate specialists to best deliver library service to children.
5. Children's librarians are advocates for library service to children.

The second set of principles has emerged more recently:

1. Libraries provide children with information as well as pleasure reading.
2. Library service to children can be optimized through partnerships and collaborations.

And finally I consider two principles that have waxed and waned over the years as social conditions and perceptions of the role of the library have changed:

1. Library use is a civic activity.
2. Americans and American libraries have a responsibility to look beyond their borders and to adopt a global perspective.

So far this works. It is a useful framework and encompasses much of what I want to say. I'm a little puzzled about where to put storytelling; that may end up back in the first set or principles.

I have written before that writing often helps me to clarify what I think or know or believe. Writing this chapter, I have been surprised at how filled with admiration and respect I am for the founding mothers of children's librarianship. Before I began, I expected to be more critical. I had thought to take the position that our legacy was an albatross around the neck of the profession, dragging us down and preventing innovation. I don't believe that any longer. Frances Jenkins Olcott, Anne Carroll Moore, and the other women who were creating -- and implementing -- a vision of library service for children more than a hundred years ago have handed down some timeless truths that together form a solid foundation for the work we do today.

And this brings me back to the business of writing. We only know what they thought and tried to do because they wrote about it in books and magazines that are available to us today through the wonders of interlibrary loan. I wonder if one hundred years from now some children's services coordinator or library educator will be looking back on MY words and reconsidering the legacy of twenty-first century children's librarianship. What a responsibility!

Writing in hotel rooms

I got my first computer in 1990. It was one of those chunky little Macs with a tiny screen that didn't even display a whole page of text. Never mind. I loved it. It was much easier than I thought it would be to make the transition from writing in longhand on yellow legal pads and plain white paper on the kitchen table to processing words on the screen. I never looked back. I find it difficult now to compose a sympathy card or a post card message because my handwriting has deteriorated to the point of illegibility, and I am much too accustomed to the delete function on my computer to craft a sentence in one draft. Two of my good friends who write extraordinary fiction start their drafts in long hand. I am awestruck.

I also have become habituated to writing in my home office. I like my Aeron chair and the easy accessibility of snacks. I like working with the door open five feet from my chair, and I like being able to walk outside when I need a break and even more fresh air. I like having my reference books and source documents right there where I need them. I like being able to spread out to the living room when the piles of documents and files threaten to take over every inch of floor space in the tiny office. Anyway, it's where I have produced every single word that has been published in the last twelve years.

I travel a lot for work and for family. Sometimes I bring my computer -- still a Mac but now a sleeker PowerBook G4 laptop. I mostly use it for email and sometimes to transcribe my notes when I'm collecting data on the road. So today I am engaged in a brave new experiment. I am working on the Book in my hotel room in Quebec City. I am here for the IFLA Conference, which stretches on endlessly for those of us who are delegates to Standing Committees. There is a lot of down time, which I am determined not to waste.

Here is what I like about writing in this new environment. Because I obviously couldn't tote a bunch of books with me, I am writing without access to the many sources that will eventually be cited. (Not everything I need to know is on the Internet.) I am accustomed to stopping frequently to check a citation or to look up a fact. Where did Anne Carroll Moore publish her book review column? When did she communicate her dislike of Stuart Little to E.B. White? What is the correct name of the Geisel Award for easy reading books? That kind of thing.

Somehow not being able to stop and fact-check as I go along has feed me to write in broader brush strokes and to focus more on the overall narrative flow. I have written in an earlier post about how I have struggled to find an authentic and personal voice when writing within the conventions of academic prose. It is also a struggle to find the narrative arc. It is all too easy to get bogged down in a series of disconnected facts. I admire writers like Jim Murphy whose impeccably researched informational books read like stories. I may have learned today, writing in my hotel room, the first lesson in how to do that.

The writer as introvert -- or extrovert?

Whenever I've taken one of those Meyer-Briggs-type personality tests, the results have been consistent. I seem to have equally strong needs for stimulation from social interaction and from solitude. My two careers -- librarian and professor -- have met those needs beautifully. There was ample opportunity for reflection and the solitary activities of reading and writing and also for the ferment of classroom discussions, conference attendance, and rewarding relationships with students and colleagues.

So this past month and a half has been an interesting one for me, being much more heavily weighted to the introverted side of life. I've been home and except for a few diversionary activities which I have dutifully recorded here, I have severely limited my face-to-face social interactions in order to write. And it's been good.

However, I had the opportunity this past Monday to spend the whole day with a group of bright, engaged librarians from Philadelphia. I was facilitating a planning process for a Pennsylvania Library Association Committee that is charged with implementing the association's flagship initiative related to early learning. The discussion was both focused and wide-ranging, as the best conversations often are. As usual, I learned a lot about what was going on out there on the front lines of public library service and about myself. What I learned about Pennsylvania public libraries will find its way into the Book, I am sure. And what I relearned about myself is that I can't write in a vacuum. Sometimes I need to get out and mix it up a bit with my colleagues who are doing the work in libraries in order to prime my pump. So all of those good, reflective librarians out there are also part of this writer's community, along with my writing friends and those implied readers who are always with me.

I'll be going to Quebec tomorrow to spend nine days at the IFLA Conference, where I expect that my interactions with children's librarians from all over the world will stimulate more thinking and help to drive the global perspective which is the underpinning for much of the Book. I'll bring my computer and try to find time for introspection as well as socializing.