Write not what you know but what you’re trying to figure out
My creative writing students, like a great many emerging writers, generally came into our MFA program believing the old adage that “writers must write what they know.” I would quickly liberate them from this narrow idea by telling them instead to write what they needed to figure out.
For clarification and emphasis, I’d point them to Joan Didion’s essay Why I Write, in which she declared, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
And that would lead us to the concept I’ve dubbed The Abiding Question.
The Abiding Question (AQ) is the personal conundrum that drives you to the page each day. That propels you from scene to scene in a quest to connect the dots. The AQ is the hidden mystery that gives the work its raison d’etre — its ultimate reason for being. It provides coherence and meaning to the narrative journey you’re crafting for your reader and, once clarified, its motivating urgency brings all the puzzle pieces into focused connection. The AQ leads to the heart of your story and reveals why, exactly, you had to write it.
Every story is a mystery
As the author, you bring the AQ to the page through your curiosity about a particular subject, your angst over a particular experience, your hunger for a particular type of understanding about some mystery in your life. The AQ is what keeps you interested in the thinking and looking that Didion described. But that’s not to say that it’s obvious.
For many writers the Abiding Question can be as elusive as the killer in a whodunit. In the beginning of the writing process, it often lies buried beneath layers of superficial concerns and plot lines. You may feel it without being able to find its contours or pinpoint its center. And if you’re writing up a storm in your early drafts, you may not want or need to stop and scope out the core question. If Just Writing works for you, then Just Write until it’s time to start revising.
But when you get lost or stuck, or when the story you love just is not resonating with your readers, that’s when the Abiding Question can be your BFF. Why? Because it signals all elements of the story to snap to attention and come together under its central command.
What’s tricky is that your AQ will be highly personal and subtextual. It drives momentum beneath the surface of both your story and your process. And it’s not a question that your story will necessarily answer. Addressing the question is not the same as answering it.
Many, if not most, AQs have no final answers. The point of writing from them is not to achieve certainty but to deepen understanding. To get closer. To make the connections that give your story meaning and structure. To chart new paths to insight that will leave you and your readers feeling richer and wiser but also, perhaps, more open-minded.
What are my AQs?
Because I can’t speak for any other writer, I’m going to give you examples of AQs from four of my own books: two memoirs and two novels.
‘Solitaire’ and ‘Gaining’
When I was writing Solitaire in my early 20s, there were no published memoirs about anorexia, so my conscious mission was to share with others — and with my parents — what had been going on inside my head for the seven years I devoted to starving myself. At first I thought I was “telling” my story. But as the writing progressed, questions began to push through. Why had I cared so much about being thin? Why did I become fixated on this goal? Why did I feel compelled to diet “better” than anyone else? What did I have in common with the other girls in my high school who also emaciated themselves?
Gradually, the memoir’s Abiding Question began to assert itself: Why was I so certain that I deserved to be punished, even to the detriment of my education and modeling career, even potentially to death?
I was too young a writer and still too close to adolescence to do justice to that AQ in Solitaire. In fact, I only began to perceive the true shape of the question when the book was already headed for publication, when I realized just how much I’d shortchanged the whole issue of recovery.
The AQ stayed with me, though, helping me recognize eventually that I hadn’t actually recovered when Solitaire was published, that vestiges of my eating disorder clung to me long after my weight returned to normal. Then nearly 30 years later, my original AQ became the driving force again behind a second and far wiser book, Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders.
‘Cloud Mountain’
When I set out to write a novel about my father’s star-crossed parents, I again thought I had a pretty clear agenda: to use my imagination to fill in the countless blanks surrounding my grandparents’ illicit interracial marriage in 1906 and their 30 years together through China’s tumultuous Warlord Era. I resented the secrecy that had always surrounded their story in life. I wanted to step into my late grandmother’s shoes and give her the adventure that she’d been unable to tell herself.
It wasn’t until I probed my family for material that my questions began to deepen. At some point in practically every conversation, my mother would cry, “How could she?!” Meaning, how could my grandmother have defied the anti-miscegenation laws of her day to marry my Chinese grandfather? How could she have abandoned everything and everyone she knew to follow him across the Pacific in 1911? How could she have stayed with my grandfather for 20 years in China and borne him 4 children (who survived), then abandoned him to return to America, burning every trace of her life with him, yet never divorcing him?
All those questions interested me, but I never knew my grandmother, so they didn’t truly drive my interest in this story. Then, when Cloud Mountain was nearing publication, I realized that, “How could she?!” also applied to my mother’s own decision to marry my Chinese father in the middle of WWII.
The AQ that had subconsciously propelled me was the mystery of my parents’ own cross-cultural union and its impact on me. Not so much, How could she, but rather, How could I ignore the legacy of prejudice that I carry within me? Needless to say, this question also relates to my memoirs’ AQ about self-punishment.
‘Glorious Boy’
As I’ve written elsewhere, my novel Glorious Boy was hatched in a dream about a young girl who hides the small boy in her care during a wartime evacuation, with devastating consequences. At the outset I thought my AQ was, What would happen as a consequence of her actions? What would she do next?
Yet again, I was circling the true AQ, which didn’t become clear to me until I dug deeply into the reactions of all my principal characters — all of whom were complicit in the girl’s truly terrible decision to hide the little boy from his parents. Late in the writing, a line thundered onto the page: “You stupid, stupid girl!” I wrote it into the story without tracing its origins, without fully understanding that it contained my true AQ.
That line had been shouted at me by an older friend of my parents when I was 6 or 7 years old. Somehow (I suspect by my own insistence) I’d been allowed to hold the man’s dachshund while we went inner tubing in the Delaware Water Gap outside their home. The dog leapt from my arms into the current, and the man screamed at me before rescuing his dog.
That was not the only terrible thing I did as a child. But neither it nor any of the other terrible things I did was ever fully confronted or resolved. They all remained, hunkered down in memory like a girl hiding during a wartime evacuation.
The true AQ that drove every thread of Glorious Boy was: Can one ever atone after doing something truly unforgivable?
I think it’s pretty clear from this exercise that I am plagued by a guilty conscience. Nothing I write will ever “cure” me of that, nor should it; writing may be therapeutic, but it’s not therapy.
That said, by identifying the Abiding Question for each of my books and then tracing the linkage between these AQs, I can get closer to understanding the forces that propel me creatively. I can discover the hidden themes that unify my body of work (as well as my psyche!). And I can begin to see what connects my stories to larger patterns of human behavior that also shape world history and our collective sense of self.
Identify your Abiding Question
Now it’s your turn. Can you identify the AQ in the story you’re working on? What is it you’re really writing to figure out?
If you’re not sure, try answering these questions, in order.
- What inspired you to write your story?
- What’s the mystery that surrounds the story?
- Why does that mystery matter to you?
- What is the conundrum at the heart of your interest — that you most need to address in order to extract personal meaning from this story? That’s your Abiding Question!
