The best stories take us. We sail to a new place while all else falls away from our awareness. Disembarkation from the story is the sweet spot of admiration, which is often, in my life as an aspiring writer, the moment my stomach swims from the angst of the desire to write, mixed with the loneliness of the search for tools, for know-how.

My first serious try, after snatched moments of writing here or there, was after my family moved to a new city. Everyone went to their job, their school, except me. I thought, “I promised myself I would write. Today is the day.” Surrounded by boxes, I unpacked the computer and started. I felt clumsy. I had questions and no one to answer them. I didn’t know a single author.

So I took a trip to my favorite book solace, the public library, and sat at a computer to do a catalog search. I typed ‘writing.’ My heart fluttered at the gentle chiding to narrow my criteria. I wanted to type, ‘help me learn to write,’ equally vague, so I browsed the listings until I came to one that grabbed me, a book titled “Writers [on Writing]” stored at 808.02 in the garden of beauty and adventure. I jotted the numbers on the handy recycled paper with a tiny library pencil and took off for the shelves.

Dewey decimal 808 is the answer to a writer’s SOS. The category 808.02 represents “Authorship Techniques.” If you go to a library and plant yourself in front of 808.02, look around and find an abundance of inspiration on writing. Look further in the 800 range to find many types of references and resources for writers.

The wonderful part about moving to a new city is the first visit to a new library. The filing system is universal, but each library has its own smell, inviting nooks with desk and chair, arrangement of the collection with respect to windows, and tall metal shelves with row after row of the fascinating thing called stories.

On this particular day, I needed non-fiction, the kind that helps a person understand fiction. The kind that reveals how stories are made. I wanted the magic potion, the answer. How do I go about writing stories?

In high school, writing had been explained as a process of outline, research, composition, exposition, finished report. The first step, outline, always made my skin clammy with dread. When I wrote, the words were accurately spelled, grammatically arranged, correctly punctuated, and completely without soul.

I yearned to know the process that led my favorite authors to the thrill of the story. I located the book entitled “Writers [on Writing]” and realized I held in my hand forty-six essays by well-known authors.

If you seek knowledge about writing fiction, if you can’t imagine yourself completing a story because you’re in a dark forest and want to take the first step but you need illumination to calm your fear, consider learning from those who have found a way through the woods, past the trees, into our lives. Their stories have received acclaim and they have one thing in common. There was a day when they yearned, ached to write, and a breakthrough occurred from their subconscious, through the layers of hardened presumptions about how to write, up through their emotion and intellect like mist to the ether, and out onto the page as a story. There was a day when they grimaced at what they had written. They made the decision to do it again and again, a common theme in the essays.

Are old books relevant for today’s writers? Absolutely. The key to writing is not the tools we use, but the process from deep inside as it migrates to our creative brain. From there, we can dictate our story, use a keyboard, grab pen and paper, or employ any method. The real writing process happens earlier, inside, and knows no technology or time frame.

I browsed many books on writing in the non-fiction Dewey Decimal category 808.02 on the shelves of my local public library. This became my destination for years as I savored the in-depth exposures of the craft I loved as if I were dwelling in a community of authors, each willing to share.