I believe no matter the discipline – no matter how much work has already been done by others – an artist has to invent their own way of understanding what they're making each time they start something new.

That might sound obvious, but when you sit down to write a novel, you're not just arranging characters and events. You're also deciding what a novel is supposed to do for the person reading it.

I've been writing short fiction for a while now, but I recently finished my second novel (the first is in a drawer somewhere in Seattle). This one forced me to come up with my own theory of the novel – not just based on the books I've read or the movies I've seen, but on the demands of the material itself.

If I was going to spend years of my life filling notebooks with drafts, diagramming character arcs, and pinning scenes to my office wall, I was going to need a better reason for doing all of that than simply having done it. Incidentally, this is why I'll never be a mountaineer. The mountain has to do more than just be there for me to bother getting on top of it.

What I came to is this:

A novel is a way of thinking.

It's a compassionate method that tests answers to questions using the mechanisms of human empathy. More than that, a novel's reception is judged more or less using a similar measure of empathy from the reader.

When a novelist asks easy or dishonest questions – ones with obvious or irrelevant answers – the novel is of lower value. But when a book asks something genuinely difficult and then works patiently towards an honest answer, we feel that depth as readers, and we value it.

I saw this clearly in a novel I just finished reading this morning, A PRIVATE VENUS by Giorgio Scerbaneneco. On the surface it's a crime novel, which means it comes with a ready-made question: Who killed the girl?

But as I read this novel – a fundamental work of Italian noir written in the 1960s – I realized the question Scerbaneneco decided to write an answer to wasn't so much who killed the girl, rather, how did she come to be killed?

Across 240 pages of narrative, he inhabits his characters long enough to make his case. A pervasive and sinister darkness, born out of modernity's encroaching influence on Milan during its economic boom during the early 60s, made the girl's death possible.

That deeper answer is what turned the book into a foundational work of Italian noir, one that went on to influence an entire tradition of crime fiction and film.

I've never written a crime novel. WHERE MY SOUL MIGHT BE is a funny, coming of age, campus novel. But the same principle applies. Every novel, in its own way, is a long answer to a made-up question.

So that's what this newsletter is all about.

Once or twice a month, I'm going to write posts just like this one, where I'll reflect on writing or books I'm reading, and we'll try to form some difficult questions. I'll also share what's happening in my professional life, as novels journey out from my solitary desk into the world at large.

I hope that you'll feel inspired to tell me about your own theories, and together we'll watch the birth of new novels as important questions unfold that require writing a novel to answer them.