If you’ve been writing as long as I have, you already know that every novel we write contains scenes that seem to come effortlessly as well as scenes that have to fight to survive. In The Professor of Eventide, there was one scene (or really a series of scenes) that I came very close to removing. The scenes take place in a library filled with books on alchemy, magic, witchcraft, and other esoteric subjects, including immortality.
The first scene I wrote in the library did come effortlessly, as a matter of fact. I’m not even entirely sure where the idea came from. When I sat down to write that day I had an idea for including the library in the story, and from the moment I wrote it all down, I loved it. The library scene had everything I enjoy as a reader, you know, atmosphere, mystery, old books, forgotten knowledge, and the sense that someone might discover something that changes their reality. It felt perfectly at home within the Gothic world of Eventide College. And that was exactly the problem.
The more I thought about the scene, the more I realized that it reminded me of another library, from one of my all-time favorite books—Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I waxed poetic on how much I love that novel here. Books are not merely decorative objects in Mr Norrell’s library—they are his lifeblood. The pursuit of lost knowledge, forgotten magic, and obscure texts forms the foundation of that story.
After I wrote the library scene, I kept going back and forth about whether or not to keep it. For quite some time, as in months, I seriously considered cutting it. I’ve been writing long enough to know that, no matter how much I love a scene, if it doesn’t serve the story, it has to go. I’ve learned how to be brutal when I’m revising my own work.
But just because something is sometimes true doesn’t mean it’s always true. Writers often hear advice about avoiding clichés and finding originality. I’ve written about avoiding clichés myself. After spending a lot of time thinking about this, what I learned is that, though the advice about clichés and originality has merit, following any advice too closely creates a different problem: the fear that any resemblance to another work is evidence that an idea should be abandoned.
Finally (it took some time) I realized that other authors have written about magical libraries. They appear in fantasy novels, Gothic fiction, mysteries, fairy tales, and other campus novels. The image itself is hardly unique. What I needed to decide is what purpose the library had in my particular story. Originally, I had just one scene set in the library, and it felt like it was there just because it was kind of cool, but the library needed a bigger purpose if it was going to stay in Southshore, Maine.
In Clarke’s novel, magical knowledge is part of an active struggle to recover a lost tradition. The books in Mr Norrell’s library are pieces of a larger historical puzzle since they point toward the restoration of magic itself. In The Professor of Eventide, however, the library serves a different function. It is less a repository of knowledge (although it is that) than a reflection of the novel’s deeper obsessions: hidden histories, forbidden questions, and the desire to uncover truths that may be better left buried.
The books on magic in Eventide are important because they contain answers (although they do), but also because they symbolize one character’s need to discover something that exists beyond the visible world. Once I understood that, the library started feeling necessary in The Professor of Eventide.
The truth is, complete originality is just about impossible. Originality rarely comes from inventing something no one has ever imagined before. More often, it comes from bringing your own questions, concerns, and perspective to familiar material. The reason the library became an important element is that I discovered how the emotional and thematic purpose serve the overall story. That was the trick. Once I understood what role the library played, then I was able to weave its importance throughout the book.
If you’ve read The Professor of Eventide, you’ll know that in the end, I not only kept the library, but I added it into a few more scenes so that its presence had purpose and made sense in the context of the story. I’m so glad I ended up keeping it. True, it provides some magical elements, and I still love the atmosphere of it, but it also taught me an important lesson about creativity. Sometimes the ideas I’m most tempted to abandon simply require me to look deeper so that I can discover why they belong in my story. The library itself was cool, but why did it matter? Once I could answer that question, the pieces of this particular puzzle fell into place.
The library remained, and once it did, it became part of the lore of Eventide College. Now I can hardly imagine the novel without it.