Bluets

            I had never really read any like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets before. The form and style are very unique and unlike a traditional novel. I thought though that it allowed her to do a lot more than a traditional novel would. They almost acted like individual chapters, each with its own short section about her experience with this color. This gave her the ability to jump around between different stories and moments, which to me gave it almost a conversational feel. Even though there are so many different stories and not really one traditionally consistent storyline, she repeatedly comes back to certain stories as if she was just continuing from where she had left off. This too made it feel more conversational. It felt less like I was reading her words, but she was telling me her own words, which strengthens her connection to the story and the color blue. When I first learned the story behind the novel, I did not fully understand what it would be about, but Nelson’s style allows for such an abstract story to be told in a both interesting and reasonable way. If she had written this a traditional novel, I feel it would not be as interesting. These short snippets to story make something as vague and abstract as the color blue an enjoyable read.

Something that Nelson talked about throughout her novel, Bluets, was her process of writing it. While she did not come out and explicitly say the process she uses, she talks about what went into her writing and things that influenced her. This added to the conversational feel that I had talked about earlier. The short snippets rather than long paragraphs made me feel as though she was writing the novel over a long period of time fitting sections into her schedule when she had time. I can almost imagine her randomly pulling out her notebook in the middle of the day to add a number to the novel. I feel this way because of the seemingly random aspects that flow to make her novel. While each piece is different from the most part, they all come together in the end to create a full story, like she had had the beginning, middle, and end constructed in her head, but wanted to display the story in a less conventional way. She seems like the type of person that does not like the conventional, which is evident in both her style and form of writing along with her storyline itself, one that takes something very abstract and vague and makes it unique.