Answering the Questions
One of the first stories I ever wrote was for an American Lit class my junior year of high school. I can’t remember the book we read, but it was by a woman? took place in the south? After we finished the book everyone had to write a paper. I don’t remember there being specific instructions–the teacher probably intentionally left it open-ended.
I was terrible in this class. I was not good at writing in high school, and I was not good at remembering what the symbolism of Moby Dick was when the teacher called on me and waited for me to answer, and I was definitely not good at writing essays about falling actions or why the denouement added something important to the story.
So I didn’t know what to write. I had enjoyed the book, liked the protagonist, but couldn’t even begin to tell you what was motivating the antagonist and why the knife is the same color as her door or whatever. And then I thought: maybe I could just write more of the story. Like, what happens after the last chapter. What are the characters doing 6 months after the end of the book.
(This was the early 90s. It makes sense and all seems so obvious now but I didn’t have the vocabulary for fanfic then. The idea of doing something with someone else’s characters wasn’t handed to me, it was just the only thing that made sense to me at the time, based on my options.)
I decided to write a story for my essay. Like, actual fiction. But was that dumb? I told my plan to some of my friends (who got better grades and were actually good at school). A friend of mine from that class, easily one of the smartest people in our grade, looked straight at me and said: “I would not do that.”
But I had no Plan B. So the night before it was due (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) I sat down to write this story and had no idea what to even write. Like where do you even start. It was totally overwhelming. With no plan or ideas and my panic rising with every passing second along with the sense that I had better start writing SOMETHING, I started writing a list of the questions I was stressed about:
- What happens in the story
- Where does it take place
- What does the room look like
- Who are the characters
- What are they doing at the beginning of the story
- Who else do we meet
- What is the problem that needs to be solved
- What happens at the end
I filled a page with questions like this and then two things happened:
- as I started asking myself these questions the story started appearing as an image in my mind, and
- I realized writing the story was just a matter of answering these questions.
So I wrote the answers as best as I could and then I wrote the story.
A great ending to this anecdote would be the teacher being blown away and me getting an awesome grade (And I do have a story like that! But this isn’t it.). I probably got a B for the paper. I remember the teacher being more interested in my process than the end result. I showed her the list of questions I’d asked myself and she held it up to the class and said “This was a good idea”.
(Sounds like a great teacher, right? She was hateful, one of my least favorite teachers ever. You can’t choose your moments.)
Writing this out now I realize how similar this is to a method Lynda Barry teaches. Start with a single word. That word conjures an image. Ask yourself questions about that image:
- Where are you
- What’s to your left and right?
- What’s beyond what’s to your left and right?
- What time of year is it?
- What do you smell?
- Who’s there?
- Who’s on their way there, who just left?
and then after you answer those questions just start writing.
You don’t have to know what you’re doing before you start moving your pencil or your cursor. When you don’t know where to start, just start anywhere. Directly addressing what you don’t know makes it safe for you to not know it.
I mention this now because I unlocked this secret about writing my first time out of the gate, and then promptly forgot about it for 20 years. I would like to not forget it again. (I will.)
