What's YOUR Abiding Question?
Your OWN need to know is your key to narrative depth and propulsion
The key to great writing is not knowing what you have to tell, but knowing what you’re asking.
Hello Loreates,
It’s been fun this week to watch one of my pro-democracy progress notes go a little bit viral, rising by about 100 reactions/hour, over 6.5K as I write this. One of Substack’s many mysteries is how and why this happens, but if you subscribed to MFA Lore because of that note, I welcome you!
MFA Lore is about the art and life of the writer and is not overtly political. [If you’re looking for more specifically political intel, please take a look at my other publication Authors For Democracy.] That said, all good literary writing is political, one way or another, so I hope you’ll enjoy our many conversations here about writing, publishing, and thriving as an engaged writer in the world!
And now, for this weekend’s post and prompt, which focus on another of the craft concepts that alternately galvanized and baffled my MFA students: The Abiding Question.
Read on!
Aimee
What is your Abiding Question?
Every good book is a mystery.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll doubtless repeat it many times more: Serious writers don’t write what they “know;” they write what they need to figure out. Or, as Joan Didion put it:
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.
And within that mantra dwells the concept of The Abiding Question.
I am always confounded when I meet a writer who asks in honest bewilderment, “You mean I need to write from a question?” It happened just the other night when I mentioned The Abiding Question in passing to a group of writers. The bewildered writer was the author of several books of academic nonfiction, which perhaps explains the reaction.
There’s a curse of authority that afflicts a large part of our society, especially in the sciences, politics, and business, and this curse pretends that it’s possible, even necessary, to “have all the answers” before you can expect anyone to listen or respect you. According to this theory, the research must be done, the results crunched, the data computed, the conclusions neatly tied up for presentation before the first line can be written. Researchers often know better and try to add sections spelling out the gaps in their findings and need for further investigation, but despite those attempts to hedge their bets, they also know the waiting media will blast out their results as if they’re gospel truth.
The curse extends, too, to readers, audiences — and voters — who turn expectantly to influencers and “leaders” for answers that are glaringly absent in their own “ordinary” lives. Answers —especially quick and easy answers —in the quest for success, health, security, self-respect, and acceptance. In fact, the vast majority of these supposed answers, when given, are speculative, at best, and at worst, complete and total BS.
Nobody holds a secret set of keys to life. As Socrates said, some 2500 years ago:
True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.
That’s as true today as ever, and the smart writer acknowledges it up front. The key to great writing is not to know what you have to tell, but to know what you’re asking. In this sense, every good book is a mystery.
What is the Abiding Question [AQ] that drives you to the page each day? That haunts your dreams each night? That refuses to let you give up on your story, even when it’s not working? That propels you from scene to scene in a quest to connect the dots? That provides coherence and meaning to the narrative journey you’re crafting for your reader? Didion again:
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
The Abiding Question is the conundrum that lies at the heart of those other swirling questions. It’s the hidden mystery that gives the work its raison d’etre — its ultimate reason for being. And once clarified, its motivating urgency serves to bring all the pieces of the story into focused connection. Then, it’s transmitted to the reader, who feels the need to address the AQ, even if not aware of it.
While every story has its own Abiding Question, these AQs often ripple in variation throughout a writer’s body of work. 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, whether you recognize or use it to your advantage, or not.
Addressing the question is not the same as answering it.
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 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 open new paths to insight that will leave you and your readers feeling richer, wiser, and more deeply human.
Possibly more humble, too. Socrates would approve of that.
What are my AQs?
Because I can’t speak for any other writer, I’m going to give you examples/stories of AQs from three of my own books: one memoir and two novels. Then the week’s prompt will give you some guidelines to clarify your own AQ.
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. 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 heading for publication and I realized just how much I’d shortchanged the whole issue of recovery. But the AQ stayed with me, 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.
Nearly 30 years later, that original AQ, Why was I so certain that I deserved to be punished? became the driving force behind a second and far wiser book, Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders.
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 surrounded their story, the claims that so many of the details had been lost to memory. I wanted to step into my late grandmother’s shoes and give her the adventure that I suspected she’d been unable to appreciate.
It wasn’t until I probed my parents 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, close to 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 since my first novel Face and would continue to push me through Flash House and on into the memoir I’ve been noodling with ever since my father’s death, 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 shame and bigotry that I carry within me? Needless to say, this question also relates to my memoir’s AQ about self-punishment.
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. The mother had been too preoccupied with her work as an aspiring anthropologist to focus on her stubborn, late-speaking 4-year-old, so she’d relied too heavily on her young ayah. The father had been too terrified of being separated from his family to face up to the reality of war looming over their remote island. And the “glorious” little boy himself had forged such a close secret alliance with the girl that no one else could reach him.
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. As I said earlier, no book or story can provide “all the answers.”
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. That links, in other words, the intensely private with the intensely universal experience of being alive.
Weekly Writing Prompt: 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. Then let me know what you find and whether this exercise was helpful to you!
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 Abiding Question at the heart of your interest—that you most need to address in order to extract personal meaning from this story?
Thanks for resurfacing this beautifully rendered and extremely practical piece, Aimee. One of the most important lessons I learned in corporate, years after leaving academia, was that is okay to say “I don’t know,” or the more camouflaged, “Let me get back to you on that.” In that context, it was, for me, a matter of maturity, being able to admit that I didn’t know something. And it brings me back to my mother telling me, when I was 20 years old, “You can write when you’re older.” Maybe she was right. I’m not saying that you cannot ask these questions when you are younger, but perhaps it’s harder to admit that there are questions to be asked. That’s why this piece is so valuable. Thank you, as always, for the insight.
I needed to read this today. Very helpful and affirming.