A library tells you what a town thinks of itself.
You can read its character in what the town funds, what it keeps open on a Sunday, and who feels welcome sitting there for four hours without buying anything. By that measure Safety Harbor takes reading seriously. If you’re trying to write a book here, that matters.
I’ve spent a lot of hours in the building at 101 Second Street North. Some of that was research, some was writing, and a fair amount was watching how people use the place. I keep coming back because it’s a good library, and because a room full of readers is a room full of the people any book is for.
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The mural over the new books shelf at the Safety Harbor Public Library. Copyright © Richard Lowe.
What makes Safety Harbor Public Library good for writers?
Start with the hours, since that’s what separates a library you can rely on from a library you visit. Safety Harbor is open seven days a week: Monday through Thursday until eight in the evening, Friday until five, Saturday until four, and Sunday afternoons. Evening hours four nights a week matter enormously if you write around a job, and Sunday hours are rare enough in Pinellas County that they’re worth planning around.
A book club discussing a novel you’d never pick up teaches you how ordinary readers read.
Then the building. The library sits a block from the waterfront, near the marina and the park, with the Baranoff Tree down the slope. The upper level gives you a view over the bay. Anyone who has tried to write in a windowless room knows what that’s worth around hour three. The interior is well spaced and quiet without being oppressive about it, and nobody hurries you out of a chair.
The collection is larger than the building suggests, because Safety Harbor belongs to the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative. Your card reaches across the county system, so a title sitting in Largo or Palm Harbor or Clearwater comes to you. For research that means you’re not limited by what one small city can shelve.
The tool library and the sensory room
Two services here surprise people who assume a library lends books and nothing else.
The first is a tool lending library. You borrow tools the way you borrow a novel. If you’re writing anything that involves making or fixing something, borrow the tool and use it. A writer who has held the tool describes the work differently from one who read about it.
The second is a sensory room. Plenty of people who want to write can’t work in an ordinary public space for very long, and this library has thought about them.
The programming runs constantly. Book clubs, including a Literary League book club. Talks from the Tampa Bay History Center. Author events tied to new releases. Drum circles. Summer reading for adults as well as children. The library has run creative writing workshops for teenagers taught by local authors.
A hundred books and $2.35
The library opened in 1938. In November of that year the WPA appointed Mrs. Daisy Cahow as the first librarian, and there’s no record of what the hours were, though a Children’s Hour ran Saturday mornings from ten to eleven. Mrs. Cahow told the meeting that keeping the library going would take circulation and supplies. Nobody has stated the problem more plainly since.
The Women’s Civic Club took it up. By January of 1939 there were a hundred books on the shelves and Mrs. Cahow was asking the town for gifts and loans of more. Mrs. Zinser organized a Book Tea where admission was a donated book, and it brought in fifty books and two dollars and thirty-five cents.
A hundred books, a tea party, and two dollars and thirty-five cents. The institution that started there’s still open eighty-eight years later, with a view of the bay and a tool library. If the gap between what you have and what you want looks large, remember how this place started.
How do you use a library well as a writer?
Most people use a library as a quiet place with wifi. That wastes most of what it offers. Three habits get more out of it. Ask the reference desk real questions. Librarians are trained researchers. I’ve watched people spend an hour failing to find something a librarian would have located in four minutes, because asking felt like an imposition. It’s their job, and they’re good at it.
Use the databases. Public libraries buy access to genealogy services, newspaper archives, and research tools that would cost you hundreds of dollars a year individually, and your card unlocks them from home. For anyone writing a memoir or a family history, the genealogy and newspaper access alone justifies the trip to get a card.
Go to the programs, especially the ones you think you’re too experienced for.
A book club discussing a novel you’d never pick up teaches you how ordinary readers read. That’s information most writers get almost none of. You’ll hear people say out loud what makes them put a book down. You’ll learn more from that than from another craft article.
The room is full of your readers
Writing in a library does something that writing at home doesn’t.
When I write at my desk, my audience is theoretical.
When I write at a table in the Safety Harbor library, my audience is thirty feet away deciding whether to check out a book. I can watch somebody pick up a memoir, read the flap, and put it back. I can see which sections stay busy. The work stops addressing nobody in particular, and it gets better.
This is also where the town’s writers turn out to be. They rarely introduce themselves, but the teen creative writing workshops, the book clubs, and the author talks pull them out of their houses. If you want to find the other people in Safety Harbor working on a book, the library is where they already are.
What can’t a library do for a writer?
A library won’t make you finish anything. The building solves the problem of where to sit, and going somewhere on purpose to work is a real motivational trick that costs nothing. It doesn’t solve the problem of what the book is about, who it’s for, or why anyone would read three hundred pages of it.
That’s a different kind of work, and most people who stall out on a book stall there.
They have the material and no shape for it. They know their life is interesting and have no idea which parts belong in a book. No amount of quiet solves that, because it’s a structural question, and you decide structure before the drafting starts.
If that’s the wall you’re hitting, talk to somebody who does this professionally. I work with people all over the country, and a good amount of that work happens with clients right here. That’s the point of being a ghostwriter in Safety Harbor instead of a service address in another state. I can meet you at the library. That’s more useful than a video call for the first conversation.
My take
Safety Harbor’s library is the best free workspace in town, and I’d use it before paying for any office. It’s quiet, it’s open seven days a week, and the people around you are the readers you’re writing for. Quiet won’t solve a structure problem, though. If you have the material and no shape for it, settle the shape before you draft. That part goes faster with someone who does it for a living.
A walk from anywhere in town
Safety Harbor is small enough that the library is a walk or a short drive from anywhere in it. The surrounding blocks make the trip better. The marina and the park are right there, the downtown is a few minutes on foot, and the area is the kind of place where you can leave a hard paragraph on the table, walk to the water, and come back with it solved.
If you want to compare, the Clearwater Main Library is fifteen minutes away and is a completely different experience: bigger, more dramatic, and closed on weekends. I use both for different kinds of work. Neither replaces the other.
More of this cluster, including where else to work in town and what the library system offers writers across the county, lives in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub. If the book itself is the part that’s stalled, the Discovery Intensive exists for exactly that, and you can spend the intervening afternoons at a table with a view of the water while you think about it.
