Source A: The notebook at closing time

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

Leah Morgan

My editor tapped the empty box on the page with the end of her pencil. “Three hundred and fifty words. Library consultation. Photograph by six.”

Simple.

I liked assignments that arrived with their edges already drawn. I would collect two opinions, add the council’s statement and return before the office kettle had boiled again.

Outside the library, rain collected in the cracked letters of the entrance sign. A noticeboard leaned towards the pavement, crowded with curling posters. Through the glass, one strip light blinked above a row of empty chairs. The building seemed to be rehearsing its own obituary.

I divided a clean page of my notebook into three headings: COST, USERS, ALTERNATIVES. At that point, I was not listening; I was sorting.

The first people I interviewed gave me the kind of sentences I expected. One called the library “the heart of the town”. Another said its closure would be “the final nail”. Their words arrived tangled with pauses and repeated phrases, and I sharpened them into arrows. They would point neatly towards anger, loss and blame.

Then a boy in school uniform approached the desk carrying a sheet of paper. He asked the librarian if he could use the printer. While he waited, he balanced a textbook on one knee and began correcting something in pencil.

“Do you come here often?” I asked.

“Most days,” he said. “It’s quieter here than home.”

I wrote the sentence down immediately. It was short, clear and useful.

“Will that keep the place open?” he asked.

I stopped writing.

Near him, an older woman was being helped to complete an online form. A delivery rider had plugged his phone into a socket beside the newspapers. At the far table, two parents whispered while their children chose books. None of them was holding a protest sign. None had prepared a speech for me.

The librarian noticed me looking. “People talk as if everyone comes because they love reading,” she said. “Some people come because this is the only place where nobody asks them to buy anything.”

My three headings suddenly looked too small. The notebook, which had seemed like a window onto the story, now felt more like a lid pressed over it.

I telephoned the editor and told her the article needed more space.

“It is still three hundred and fifty words,” she replied. “Make each one earn its place. And include the other side.”

The council’s statement explained that more services could be accessed online and that another branch operated several miles away. Earlier, I would have placed those sentences at the end and considered the job balanced. Instead, I returned to the people I had interviewed. I checked the spelling of their names, asked permission to use their words and asked what, precisely, would change for them.

The story grew slower and more exact. It became less interested in the building’s cracked sign and more interested in the lives moving quietly beneath it.

At six, the box on the page was still the same size. I no longer mistook a small story for a simple one.