The Best writers' library I can imagine

I had an idea. A wonderful, crazy, bizarre idea. Yesterday I wanted to write an exercise about a character, but none of the exercises I was finding in my various books and sources were helping. So I wrote a poem about the character's backstory, the kind of poem you might read on a fan site for a famous person, sort of angsty and intense and vivid and sparse. A "Getting to understand you" poem for someone I've never met. And no one else is ever going to get to read it. But it helped. (This was not the amazing idea.)

See, I was thinking about all the writing exercises and scrawled notes and outlines and caffeine and props and bits and pieces that are involved when a book is being written. I imagined all that stuff and imagined a library where you could read a book and then browse all those bits and pieces that made up the book, resulted in the book, helped, added, advertised, linked, and generally were a part of that book's writing process. A library like that would be amazing. Seeing the notes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote while imagining Holmes. Reading Stephen King's thought processes during his first hundred rejections. Taking a look at Tokien's character notes (if he had any) for Middle Earth. And... and... and...

I can't even begin to imagine subject indexing this collection, let alone storing it in a way that could be useful. If it were actually complete there'd be books, photographs, notebooks, receipts and beer mats with ideas: Horses in space? scrawled, helpfully, along their edge. Quotes on Post-Its. Coffee mugs galore. Authors' favourite sweaters. Paths walked beside canals. Kleenex and pet cats. Thoughts themselves.

Insane, impossible, something out of Doctor Who. But I would really, really like to see that library.

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"Magnus Christensson's notes" by Jacob Botter at flickr.