The other day I was looking through one
of my writing notebooks and I was struck by how many questions there
were in it. There was at least one curly little ? on almost every
single page, and on some pages there were many. Questions about the
plot, about what the characters should do next, about other ways the
story might go, about why I’m writing this thing and what I’m trying to
say.
It occurred to me then, looking at all
those pesky interrogative marks scattered like tiny thumbscrews across
the pages, how utterly vital questions are to any creative endeavour.
How they’re always quietly (or annoyingly) driving the work forward,
prompting one to ponder, delve, rethink, push a little harder, venture
out of the comfort zone, change course …
So I decided it might be a worthwhile
exercise to choose the five most useful, recurring, indispensable
questions that come up for me again and again during the writing
process. Limiting myself to only five was part of the creative challenge
of the exercise.
Rather than tenets or rules to live by, these then are my top five questions to create by:
Why?
What if…?
What else?
What’s going on right now?
Really?
WHY?
With the exception of scientists and
three-year-olds, most of us probably don’t ask enough “why” questions in
a day. If you’ve ever been driven nuts by a kid who keeps repeating
that pesky monosyllable after every “final” answer, you’ve felt the
power of Why?
No wonder Why? annoys
us: it forces us to do something our easily-distracted squirrel minds
would rather avoid: to keep thinking. It’s the question that drives us
on beyond our unexamined assumptions and easy certainties. Why? is how I find out who my characters are and what they’re likely to do.
While you’re at it, try
asking some of the people in your life a “why” question more often. Not
as a complaint or a rebuke, just to see what they think about something a
little deeper than what needs to go on this week’s grocery list. (Have
you ever noticed how rarely adults ask one another Why? unless they’re angry?)
Why? can burrow beneath the
superficial skin of daily life and reveals the hidden or forgotten
depths in those you think you know, including yourself.
WHAT IF…?
“What if trees had eyes?” my son
wondered the other day as we were walking to the park. That kicked my
sluggish mind into gear, as “what if” questions always do. It’s fitting
that we were on our way to a playground at the time, because that’s
what What if? does: it turns the real world into an infinite
playground for the imagination. It’s the world’s cheapest and most
effective de-aging solution.
Okay, I’ll play: what if trees did
have eyes? Eyes but no mouths or arms, so they could watch whatever was
going on around them but be unable to do anything about it. Would a
lumberjack see terror in a Douglas fir’s baby blues as he approached
with his chainsaw? Or maybe trees really do have eyes. After all,
they’re photosensitive beings: they take in light through every leaf,
and use it to grow. What if we thought of a tree’s leaves as its “eyes”?
Hey, there may be a metaphor here, or a haiku:
summer sun at noon
with every single leaf
the elm tree looks up.
... or maybe even the seed of a whole story. Thanks, son.
WHAT ELSE?
Related to “what if” is the less
well-known but equally powerful “what else?” The discoveries and
connections I’ll make in a day, the deepening of what’s already on the
page, will come about thanks to the mental nudging of “what else” and
its refusal to be satisfied with the easy plot device or the
pre-packaged solution. “What else,” to me, can mean many things. What
else is going on in this scene? What else does the reader need to know
to make sense of this? What else do these words imply? What else do I
have to say? Maybe nothing, but I won’t know for sure if I don’t ask.
[Illus. Sean Caulfield]
WHAT’S GOING ON RIGHT NOW?
This question can propel me in two
different directions: both deeper into the work and out of it, back into
the unwritten world. Both are important for writing. Whenever either I
or the work-in-progress seem to have lost focus, that’s the time to
pause and ask what’s really happening at this very moment.
In terms of the writing, it’s a way of
regrounding myself in the sensory, the immediate, the palpable urgencies
of whatever place or situation my characters are in here and now. The
question compels me to step inside the story and look around, to see,
touch, hear, taste and smell this imaginary world I’m building out of
words. And doing that reengages me with the story and the beings in it,
and often shows me the way to go forward, from right now into the very next thing that should happen.
But “What’s going on right
now?” is also useful in one’s own life outside the page. I think a lot
of people never finish (or begin) that novel they’ve always planned to
write because they can’t stay put long enough in right now. It’s
where everything happens, of course, but most of us avoid it whenever
possible: it’s much easier to live in the past or dream of the great
work we’re going to do tomorrow, yes, definitely tomorrow, because today
we just don’t feel like it...
There are times, of course,
when it is best to let the work sit for a while and do something else
(for five minutes, an hour, a day, a year…?). And asking myself what’s
going on right now can help me understand when that’s the right thing to
do. The question regrounds me in my own here and now, reminding me that
the flesh is mortal and one can only accomplish so much in a day. So
get up and stretch, the dog is whining to be let out, go play with the
kids, take your long-suffering spouse to dinner at a fancy restaurant.
The miraculous thing is that while you’re doing that, your mind will
still be working, dreaming, forging unexpected links and taking
audacious leaps across synapses, and then, just when you’ve completely
forgotten about that problem you sweated over for hours, the answer
comes, as if out of nowhere. (When really it comes from all the stuff
going on inside you that’s not accessible to the prefrontal cortex.
You’re not in control of everything, you know).
REALLY?
This one is the wet rag, the snarky
teenager, the sober second opinion. “Cast a cold eye on life, on death,”
Yeats said, and it’s good advice for anyone riding the exhilarating
windhorse of creativity. He could have added, “cast a cold eye on your
deathless creations, too.” That’s what Really? is for. I’m sure
I’ve just penned the most magnificent pages the world will ever have the
great fortune to read, but the next morning, once the high has worn
off, I had better take another look. Once you’ve won the Booker you will
never need to doubt your own brilliance again, but until then…
Still, like the other four, this is a
dangerous question. It can easily be overused or asked at the wrong
stage in the creative process, since it comes from the Critic-Within,
that jaded gremlin who will choke off one’s imaginative flow if given
too much time and power over the work.
And like “What’s going on
right now?”, the cold eye of “Really?” can be usefully turned on the
unwritten world too, and cast at every glossy sales pitch, every last
word on the subject, every politician who spins us a golden tale of
better days ahead. And once we’ve asked it, we might find ourselves
returning full circle to that other question that comes in handy
whenever we’re told, by ourselves or others, That’s Just the Way Things
Are:
Why?
One more thing: don’t forget to
say thanks once in a while. To God, or the muse, or the right cerebral
cortex of the human brain, or whatever mystical or biological source you
believe your great ideas ultimately come from. No one creates anything
in a vacuum. Whether there’s an Author behind it all or not, it seems
pretty clear to me that this universe is an unfinished, always
astonishing act of creativity. Just look at a lilac bush, or a giraffe.
The universe came up with stars, galaxies, planets, life, and then it
really got going and dreamed up a being that could create universes
inside its own head, share them with others, and change the way things
are. That’s creativity, and it’s in everyone, and belongs to everyone,
so here’s one more question:
What are you doing with it?
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