In a post on Lit Hub, Sarah Shoemaker says being a librarian has helped her research information for her books and encourages writers to seek out a library’s help with their own. “My librarianship was as a reference librarian in a large university library that contained about 14 million books,” she says. “One might have a sense of wholeness in a large library, that ideas are almost flowing from one book to another.”
When you begin a book, you might know know exactly which direction you’re taking, and that’s ok. “Writers need to be alert to new ideas, new directions, new ways to tell or to take the story that she hadn’t previously considered,” Shoemaker says. “Research can do that for a writer, if the she is open to it.”
As any Wikipedia user knows, a search for one nugget of information can take you down a rabbit hole of knowledge. “For my novel, Mr. Rochester, I was looking for information about sugar-cane farming in Jamaica in the early-to mid-nineteenth century, because we know from Jane Eyre that Rochester spent some time in his early adulthood on that island,” Shoemaker writes. She began with Wikipedia articles, which led her to some 19th century lithographs, and then went to the Michigan Electronic Library, where she found a first-person account of a sugar planter in Jamaica. “Published more than 150 years before I needed it, it told me everything I hadn’t yet realized that I needed to know in creating Edward Rochester’s experiences in Jamaica,” Shoemaker adds.
Librarians can help you find even the most esoteric information and learn which sources to trust. “Who says this? What is their source of information, and is it reliable?” Shoemaker asks. “Is it first-hand information? What is the writer’s reputation, and what are his credentials? Who stands to gain—or lose—by it?” The right combination of sources can give you a more balanced version of history and even contradict official accounts. “In the end, everything (well, nearly everything) you want to know—everything you need to know is in a library,” Shoemaker writes. “And the librarian there, if he knows his business, can help you find it.”
