Reminder

The pre-school kids on their class visit to the library are cute. They file down the stairs with their fingers against their lips. Shh shh, they say loudly to each other. When they troop past me, they tap their heads and make wide motions with their arms. You’re a library person, one of the little girls tells me, doing the wide arm motion thing again. This means, Library Person. 

Okay, I say. They dance around me as I help them pick out books. The easy ones. Dinosaurs. Princesses. Puppies. Dragons. The more difficult to find. A book about Aurora. A book in the Pig the Pug series. No, not that one. No, not that one either. The one with the orange cover? Yes! The girl who wants an Aurora book is still waiting. (Who is Aurora? I have to google it. Ah. It’s Sleeping Beauty. But we’re out of Sleeping Beauty books.) How about Cinderella? 

No.

Belle? 

No.

Elsa?

No.

One of my co-workers digs around in the back room and comes out with a Little Mermaid book and saves the day. Sorry she was being so picky, one of the teachers tells me, but I wave it off. She knows what she wants. 

Home in the afternoon, and I sit down at my desk to work on the book I’ve been trying to write, but nothing comes. The main character doesn’t know what she wants. This is a problem in a story because wanting is the whole shebang. It goes like this: 

What does the hero want? What is standing in her way? Which leads to conflict. Which keeps the reader turning pages. Think: Dorothy wanting to make it home to Kansas. Or Chief Brody wanting to catch the shark so it will stop eating people over Fourth of July weekend. 

Meanwhile, my character is schlumping around wanting nothing. The world she’s in won’t stop morphing and changing. The world I’m in won’t stop either. I used to be able to do this better. Fit my noise-cancelling headphones over my ears and muffle out the distractions. What if I have lost my writer self? 

Here is something I want. A library person to greet me at the door, welcome me in. Find the missing writerly pieces on the shelves and give them back. 

The pre-school kids finish their visit. They skip past me holding their books. One of them makes the wide armed sign again, and I laugh as I remember. It's me. I am the library person.