What Writers Do

Right now I’m reading three novels: Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna. 

Moby Dick makes sense as a novel: we meet our guy, call him Ishmael, he wants to join a whaling voyage, so he goes to the docks, and then he finds one. That’s as far as I’ve gotten but reliable sources inform me that soon, the boat will set sail and its crew will search for a whale. That’s a good plot for a novel: the characters have a goal. We’ll read to the end to find out if they achieve it. 

Evenings and Weekends is a little looser, but still legible. Five or six characters are navigating life in modern London, set over one weekend in summer 2019 when it’s so hot out (and there’s also a whale here, actually, beached on the Thames). Imagine you’re 28, living in London, you can’t quite afford it, you love someone kind of, and it’s scary, you go outside and everyone’s there. There’s a feeling McKenna is trying to capture in words. 

2666 came out in 2004 after Roberto Bolaño died in 2003. He had written five short novels, but then his literary executor and publisher looked at it and said “no this is one novel” so they published that. I’m only in the second out of five. In the first, “The Part About The Critics,” four literature professors who are obsessed with a German novelist end up going down to the Mexican town where he was rumored to last be seen. In the second, “The Part About Amalfitano,” we spend time with a philosophy professor in this Mexican town, Santa Theresa, and was a kind of tour guide for the professors. I haven’t gotten to “The Part About Fate,” “The Part About The Crimes,” or “The Part About Archimboldi” yet.  

It moves slowly. Characters are in love, then they’re not. Someone goes to Switzerland to see a poet. We don’t hear from them again. Nothing happens. Many things that do happen don’t advance the plot. I don’t know what they mean. I feel like people who really love literature would understand why Bolaño makes these moves, but I’m just along for the ride.

Helpfully, there’s a serial killer on the loose in Santa Theresa. Characters sometimes mention that there have been a few dozen unsolved murders in this part of Mexico. So even though it hasn’t really come up yet, my midwit plot-starved brain still has a question to hold onto. If it were not for the murderer lurking behind the scenes, I don’t think I could keep reading, because I just don’t understand it. And what I understand even less is the thought process that would lead a man to write a novel like that.

See, when I write, it is often to explain or work through an idea. “Here’s something that I found or have thought about that you, the reader, might find interesting—let me share it with you.” But that’s pretty far away from writing five loosely-connected novels, full of digressions. It seems unfriendly to the reader, keeping us out instead of welcoming us in. 

Why would he do that? To what end? I want to know what’s happening so why not tell me?

As I’ve been wondering this, I found it helpful to think of Bolaño not as a writer like I’m a writer, but as an artist like a painter is an artist. The painter might paint a portrait or a landscape so that you can see the same thing she did, but she might also create something abstract for her own reasons—becuase she wanted to see if she could, or she wanted to see how the colors looked together.

It’s fun to make something that you’re good at making—whether it’s an essay, a novel, a sculpture, a pizza, a quilt, whatever. It’s satisfying to choose a craft and improve at it. 

I think I get confused because I think of writing first and foremost as a means of communication, while others think of it as a creative medium. Drawing and painting feel more purely creative, because if you were wanting only to show what something looks like, you would use a camera. But writing can still be used for both. 

To me, the self-expression is subservient to the communication, but I’m recognizing not everyone feels that way. I can back my way into understanding why someone would write a novel that confuses the reader, but it doesn’t come naturally. 

I thought I knew what other writers do. But I’m intrigued, and surprised, and grateful that there’s another world out there.

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