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Continuing the series of writing exercises inspired by Susan Breen’s The Fiction Class
Description: Write about a place that was important to you growing up, but don’t put people in it. Just describe it as though you were painting the picture with words.
The building is old and looks like a castle. At least, part of it does. The grown-up part. That’s the part that calls, like a siren song, to readers.
The main adult section and the children’s library are housed in the new building. Its concrete blocks are stocky and uniformly grey and utterly boring to look at – from the outside. On the inside, well, that’s a horse of a different color entirely.
The front door and foyer are non-descript, as are the carpets and walls. Bland, boring, and serviceable pretty much sum them up. Occasional bursts of color are found in the flyers and announcements posted in the entryway – notices of book fairs and lectures, sales and giveaways, promotions and lost things. Newsworthy things. But they’re not the interesting bits. The interesting bits are hidden away inside, tucked inside covers and piled on shelves.
That’s where the books live.
The library is not much to see, but it doesn’t have to be. Not the building, anyway. All the magic is in the words. The millions, billions, trillions, zillions of words that comprise the stories locked away inside the books. The library is everything, everywhere, all at once. It is cold and full of prickly terror and excitement over here, warm and soft and snuggly over there. It is hard and soft, old and new, hot and cold, rich and poor. The library is full of keys and golden tickets, passwords and secret codes.
The library is full of life, of lives – so many more than it is possible to even imagine in the small-town world that holds it. It is potential, possibility, opportunity all packaged in bricks and mortar. And it waits there, patiently, for each new visitor.
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