4 QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD NEVER ASK ABOUT YOUR BOOK
“No such thing as a stupid question.”
Sounds good, right? Sounds like, “Yay! Let’s be inquisitive and creative and learn stuff!” But here’s the problem: there is such a thing as a stupid question, and the bigger problem is that stupid questions are not just missed opportunities, they are actually counter-productive to curiosity, creativity, and learning.
As any writer can tell you, the writing life is full of questions:
“Why doesn’t anybody like my protagonist?”
“How can I ever find time to write?”
“Why is this so hard???”
These are all good questions. They’re specific, and they’re focused on the problem—which means they’re ultimately focused on the solution. But not all questions are created equal, and if you’re not disciplining yourself to ask good questions, your best-case outcome is a long, circuitous bout of flailing before, if you’re lucky, you finally find a suitable answer.
Why Asking Good Questions Is a Crucial Skill for Writers
Writing, perhaps more than any other art form, is about harnessing creativity with logic. As historian David McCullough says:
Writing is thinking clearly. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.
This starts and ends with the ability to identify challenges and frame appropriate questions about them. Mystery author Sue Grafton once said something that has become the paradigm for my entire approach to writing:
If you know the question, you know the answer.
In short, good writing is not about finding the right answer. It’s about finding the right question.
Mind-blowing, right?
But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Finding the right question is first and foremost about developing the logical skills to strip away all the wrong questions.
The Difference Between a Good Question and a Bad Question
So what’s the difference? What makes one question “good” and another “bad” to the point of uselessness?
I receive a lot of questions from writers. Most are pretty simple; most are the same questions I see and answer over and over again. Some are so brilliant, they help me see answers I hadn’t previously realized I was looking for. Others, however, demonstrate that the writer’s primary obstacle is not whatever it is they’re asking me about, but rather a failure to look deeper into themselves and do the hard logical work of figuring out what they’re really asking. Because if they did that, half the time, they wouldn’t even need to ask.
The common pattern in good vs. bad questions is simple:
Good questions: specific.
Bad questions: vague.
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