Introduction: About Answers Without Questions
Years and years ago, when I was a blockheaded grad student, I was teaching a composition class and I put together a super-complicated essay prompt and presented it to the students. They just sort of stared at me. I asked if they had any questions.
There were no questions.
That was absurd. I mean, I wrote the stupid prompt, and I had questions! There had to be questions. So I had the students write down whatever questions they had about the assignment, and pass their questions to the front of the classroom.
And it turned out that, yeah, they had some questions—very useful questions that they were apparently too shy or intimidated to ask orally.
There were no questions.
That was absurd. I mean, I wrote the stupid prompt, and I had questions! There had to be questions. So I had the students write down whatever questions they had about the assignment, and pass their questions to the front of the classroom.
And it turned out that, yeah, they had some questions—very useful questions that they were apparently too shy or intimidated to ask orally.
Like just about all schools, my university shut down for the virus in March 2020, and after spring break we brought our classes back on Zoom.
I’d never taught a class on Zoom before—had never even been on it until I’d had a pandemic happy hour chat with a friend the week before classes resumed. I was faced with the interesting and somewhat anxiety-inducing problem of holding a creative writing class in this new environment, and after pondering on it for a bit, I decided that questions were the solution. Written questions, and answers.
After the composition class years ago, I’d continued doing this in my literature classes as a way of getting discussions going, and it seemed to work. Maybe it would work even better with creative writing on Zoom! So I got on our Learning Management System—we were still using Blackboard then—and I set up a weekly discussion assignment and called the assignment a Participation Question. I posed the prompt:
Please ask a serious question about the readings or about writing or about the class....
The questions were due early in the week, and students would write and post their questions. Then I’d write out answers, and in the Wednesday or Thursday Zoom classes I’d go over questions and the answers and elaborate if necessary and tell stories and try to be profound.
That’s the origin of this book. Answers Without Questions is the result of four long semesters and a couple of summer sessions—14 or so classes, mostly entry-level creative writing classes but with an advanced fiction class and few lit classes mixed in, with enrollments ranging from 15 to 40 students per class.
These are the answers I gave to the questions. But the questions themselves…I got rid of them. For one thing, I didn’t have the permission of all the young scholars to use their writing/questions. For another…the lack of context in the answers adds a level of mystery and ambiguity, at least to me.
You will definitely notice some repetition in my answers. That’s because, over the course of two years, many questions got asked more than once. Sometimes many times more than once. I’ve just tried to stay more or less consistent in my answers.
I’d never taught a class on Zoom before—had never even been on it until I’d had a pandemic happy hour chat with a friend the week before classes resumed. I was faced with the interesting and somewhat anxiety-inducing problem of holding a creative writing class in this new environment, and after pondering on it for a bit, I decided that questions were the solution. Written questions, and answers.
After the composition class years ago, I’d continued doing this in my literature classes as a way of getting discussions going, and it seemed to work. Maybe it would work even better with creative writing on Zoom! So I got on our Learning Management System—we were still using Blackboard then—and I set up a weekly discussion assignment and called the assignment a Participation Question. I posed the prompt:
Please ask a serious question about the readings or about writing or about the class....
The questions were due early in the week, and students would write and post their questions. Then I’d write out answers, and in the Wednesday or Thursday Zoom classes I’d go over questions and the answers and elaborate if necessary and tell stories and try to be profound.
That’s the origin of this book. Answers Without Questions is the result of four long semesters and a couple of summer sessions—14 or so classes, mostly entry-level creative writing classes but with an advanced fiction class and few lit classes mixed in, with enrollments ranging from 15 to 40 students per class.
These are the answers I gave to the questions. But the questions themselves…I got rid of them. For one thing, I didn’t have the permission of all the young scholars to use their writing/questions. For another…the lack of context in the answers adds a level of mystery and ambiguity, at least to me.
You will definitely notice some repetition in my answers. That’s because, over the course of two years, many questions got asked more than once. Sometimes many times more than once. I’ve just tried to stay more or less consistent in my answers.
One of the sad repetitions you’ll find here is the Shelby Hearon “never the book in your head” anecdote. Shelby was a novelist and was my first creative teacher back in spring semester, 1979. Our class was called “Regional Writers,” and was offered not by the English Department but by the American Studies Department. I was a bone-stupid Young Scholar and didn’t know what to expect. We met in a seminar room on the third floor of Garrison Hall at the University of Texas, and the moment Shelby entered the room and sat down at the head of the table and opened her mouth, I was—changed.
Awhile back, doing some post-pandemic cleaning and sorting, I came across one of my notebooks from that time. On one page I wrote
It’s never the book in your head!
Shelby said that. (Not in class, actually. My memory is that we were in an elevator over at the Ransom Center, going to see a speaker). And she repeated, emphasized the word “Never.” I remembered this and wrote it in my notebook because what she said made perfect sense to me, then and now—that the book (story, poem, essay, whatever) exists perfect and pristine in the safety of your brain, but by the time it’s miraculously transformed into physical existence, it’s become something different. There’s no predicting whether the final creative artifact will be better or worse than the one in your head, but you can guarantee that it’ll be different.
Awhile back, doing some post-pandemic cleaning and sorting, I came across one of my notebooks from that time. On one page I wrote
It’s never the book in your head!
Shelby said that. (Not in class, actually. My memory is that we were in an elevator over at the Ransom Center, going to see a speaker). And she repeated, emphasized the word “Never.” I remembered this and wrote it in my notebook because what she said made perfect sense to me, then and now—that the book (story, poem, essay, whatever) exists perfect and pristine in the safety of your brain, but by the time it’s miraculously transformed into physical existence, it’s become something different. There’s no predicting whether the final creative artifact will be better or worse than the one in your head, but you can guarantee that it’ll be different.
So, anyway, to return to and apply Shelby’s Wisdom: this is not the book that was in my head when I was thinking about a book. But it is the book that came out of my fingers into a keyboard and computer, and eventually onto some paper, and that will have to be enough. It’s a sort of record of some of the things we did and do in my creative writing classes, and on that level it might be useful.
LMW
Chapter Five: Guilt Won’t Get Your Book Written
I think an occasional ALL CAPS might work. (See John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, FOR A GREAT MANY ALL CAPS PASSAGES).
Italics are the usual way of emphasizing.
But be careful—readability is very important. And long italicized/ALL CAPS passages are hard to read….
Guilt won’t get your book or story or poem written—guilt just makes you feel bad.
Go find something that makes you feel good—knitting, fly fishing, basketball, cooking, old movies, video games....
The process of learning something is for me the best part of any activity....
Playlists for books are a great idea. Stories too.
Do it. What music does your protagonist listen to? What do you listen to?
The “real” person will be transformed by the magic of imagination and the exigencies of the story into a brand-new and different “fictional” person.
My response is/was pretty basic—don’t base your characters on people who will be hurt.
(Unless you want to hurt them).
(Which is always an option).
Your life as you live it is your most precious writing resource. Don’t be afraid to use it in your writing.
When your focal character opens their eyes, what do they see? There’s your description—maybe, if it’s needed.
I actually think Tolkien was doing this….
The best novel? Ever? Oh--War & Peace, by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.
You don’t want your best writing buried where no one will notice it!
Setting is always important, unless your characters are floating around shapeless in a formless void. Most of the time they are some place.
Remember—the BODY is also a setting....
Probably The Great Gatsby, for the punctuation.
Yes—I am motivated by em-dashes and commas!
I may have talked about this before....
You can tag the dialogue through action or setting, too.
What are your characters doing while talking? What are they seeing?
Read your story backwards, aloud.
This removes the context of the paragraph, and you can see (hear) each sentence in all its glory/ignominy.
Fifty-one years, ha!
You have to be persistent.
I think foreshadowing is best accomplished as an aspect of revision.
In your first draft, going forward, it’s more important to just get to the end.
Obvious isn’t always bad, and what’s obvious to you—the author—isn’t necessarily going to be obvious to the reader....
Are they talking on the phone or face to face?
They could be walking, shooting zombies, fishing, watching tv, washing dishes, sitting on the can, shopping, driving, in church, in a meeting, fighting—they could be doing whatever it is people do...while they talk….
Also—it’s important to think: are they actually listening to each other?
I mean, really—how many times do people actually fully pay attention to one another?
Good question! I’m trying to figure this out myself!
Try going for empathy.
No one is really frightened while reading a horror novel. No one thinks they are actually going to die.
I would keep moving forward and get the story written and then look critically at what you have.
Do you really need a backstory with past relationships? Maybe—but maybe not.
You take something you’ve written that has a lot of problems (all texts are flawed!) and then you fix the problems.
It takes time and attention and is really rewarding.
I think the aging process has left me more easily distracted than I once was.
The problem with writing is that life gets in the way.
How much time can you afford to spend on writing? For most of us—not enough.
Day jobs are good. Having a roof over your head and food in your belly is probably more important than writing!
A lot of writers do practice writing….
It’s great to treat yourself when you accomplish something! Everyone needs to do this!
For me—beer and turkey legs!
Italics are the usual way of emphasizing.
But be careful—readability is very important. And long italicized/ALL CAPS passages are hard to read….
Guilt won’t get your book or story or poem written—guilt just makes you feel bad.
Go find something that makes you feel good—knitting, fly fishing, basketball, cooking, old movies, video games....
The process of learning something is for me the best part of any activity....
Playlists for books are a great idea. Stories too.
Do it. What music does your protagonist listen to? What do you listen to?
The “real” person will be transformed by the magic of imagination and the exigencies of the story into a brand-new and different “fictional” person.
My response is/was pretty basic—don’t base your characters on people who will be hurt.
(Unless you want to hurt them).
(Which is always an option).
Your life as you live it is your most precious writing resource. Don’t be afraid to use it in your writing.
When your focal character opens their eyes, what do they see? There’s your description—maybe, if it’s needed.
I actually think Tolkien was doing this….
The best novel? Ever? Oh--War & Peace, by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.
You don’t want your best writing buried where no one will notice it!
Setting is always important, unless your characters are floating around shapeless in a formless void. Most of the time they are some place.
Remember—the BODY is also a setting....
Probably The Great Gatsby, for the punctuation.
Yes—I am motivated by em-dashes and commas!
I may have talked about this before....
You can tag the dialogue through action or setting, too.
What are your characters doing while talking? What are they seeing?
Read your story backwards, aloud.
This removes the context of the paragraph, and you can see (hear) each sentence in all its glory/ignominy.
Fifty-one years, ha!
You have to be persistent.
I think foreshadowing is best accomplished as an aspect of revision.
In your first draft, going forward, it’s more important to just get to the end.
Obvious isn’t always bad, and what’s obvious to you—the author—isn’t necessarily going to be obvious to the reader....
Are they talking on the phone or face to face?
They could be walking, shooting zombies, fishing, watching tv, washing dishes, sitting on the can, shopping, driving, in church, in a meeting, fighting—they could be doing whatever it is people do...while they talk….
Also—it’s important to think: are they actually listening to each other?
I mean, really—how many times do people actually fully pay attention to one another?
Good question! I’m trying to figure this out myself!
Try going for empathy.
No one is really frightened while reading a horror novel. No one thinks they are actually going to die.
I would keep moving forward and get the story written and then look critically at what you have.
Do you really need a backstory with past relationships? Maybe—but maybe not.
You take something you’ve written that has a lot of problems (all texts are flawed!) and then you fix the problems.
It takes time and attention and is really rewarding.
I think the aging process has left me more easily distracted than I once was.
The problem with writing is that life gets in the way.
How much time can you afford to spend on writing? For most of us—not enough.
Day jobs are good. Having a roof over your head and food in your belly is probably more important than writing!
A lot of writers do practice writing….
It’s great to treat yourself when you accomplish something! Everyone needs to do this!
For me—beer and turkey legs!
Chapter Fifteen: Your Characters are Hungry
Outlines...?
Make a list of 30 things you want to have happen in the novel. Bullet points are fine.
Does your bullet point take up less than 800 words to tell? Well, no it probably doesn’t—there is always something more to say about anything.
Don’t let your internal editor—the dreaded voice of the adversary—worry you about continuity and/or “quality”—just keep moving forward.
Eating is a profound rhetorical connection between writer and reader. So—do it. Use eating.
Your characters are hungry. Feed them!
Also remember that eating is about memory as much as it is about nutrition. (Watch some shows on Food Network and see how chefs and cooks present their food—very often they start with a memory).
Making coffee becomes an anchor for a memory.
Meals eaten with two or more people are about how the people relate to one another.
Go back to Food Network again and see how Guy Fieri describes food. He can be kind of annoying but he’s very good at what he does.
Watch almost any episode of The Sopranos. Read writers to see how they do it. Cook something—eat it. Research is fun!
I always look for new things to try in class—these Participation Questions are a pandemic adaptation....
I would rather not be confused.
People have lives—they are very busy!
Most writers pay—or at least buy dinner for—their beta readers.
This might sound glib, but—can you pretend to be confident?
Most of the people reading your work do not and will not know you. So if you pretend to be confident, they will think you’re confident.
Writing is about acting as much as it is about putting words on a screen or a page....
Also, I sense a writer’s confidence by how the scenes unfold early in a story. The beginning works, then the next scene takes the story another step, then another. The writer shows that they know what they are doing structurally....
So...maybe pretend to yourself to be confident while you learn various writerly skills...??
For a long time I subscribed to several word-of-the-day email lists, and any word I found interesting would go into my writing. I particularly liked the one with archaic words. (“carking” made it into That Demon Life). But imagery can be constructed with basic words, too....
I read Lord of the Rings when I was in the 6th grade and I wanted to do what Tolkien was doing. A year later I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and it changed everything in my life....
I’ve had a few poems published, though not many. I tend toward narrative poems—stories that have been stripped down to 14 or so lines....
The writer should always interrogate themselves about how they are using the character who is unlike them. Is the writer appropriating a story? Is the writer stereotyping or exploiting?
The first step should always be empathy. And empathy doesn’t come naturally, you have to work for it and learn it.
This is something I do not know! I’ve had students who are game writers—I assume there are books written about game-writing how-to and theory....
When I started I was in a class like you all, and I just wrote the story as it came out. I did a LOT of reading outside of the classes—I went to the Best American Story shelf in the library and worked through about 40 years or so, and I subscribed to multiple literary magazines. And I wrote a lot, which is also a way of learning. And as I learned more I became more methodical—planning the story with—yes—outlines, and focusing on revision rather than generation....
I started calling myself a writer fairly late—probably about the time I got the Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Even though I’d been writing for a long time, that was a big external validation....
Keep them simple—only describe what the focal character is seeing/experiencing....
Make a list of 30 things you want to have happen in the novel. Bullet points are fine.
Does your bullet point take up less than 800 words to tell? Well, no it probably doesn’t—there is always something more to say about anything.
Don’t let your internal editor—the dreaded voice of the adversary—worry you about continuity and/or “quality”—just keep moving forward.
Eating is a profound rhetorical connection between writer and reader. So—do it. Use eating.
Your characters are hungry. Feed them!
Also remember that eating is about memory as much as it is about nutrition. (Watch some shows on Food Network and see how chefs and cooks present their food—very often they start with a memory).
Making coffee becomes an anchor for a memory.
Meals eaten with two or more people are about how the people relate to one another.
Go back to Food Network again and see how Guy Fieri describes food. He can be kind of annoying but he’s very good at what he does.
Watch almost any episode of The Sopranos. Read writers to see how they do it. Cook something—eat it. Research is fun!
I always look for new things to try in class—these Participation Questions are a pandemic adaptation....
I would rather not be confused.
People have lives—they are very busy!
Most writers pay—or at least buy dinner for—their beta readers.
This might sound glib, but—can you pretend to be confident?
Most of the people reading your work do not and will not know you. So if you pretend to be confident, they will think you’re confident.
Writing is about acting as much as it is about putting words on a screen or a page....
Also, I sense a writer’s confidence by how the scenes unfold early in a story. The beginning works, then the next scene takes the story another step, then another. The writer shows that they know what they are doing structurally....
So...maybe pretend to yourself to be confident while you learn various writerly skills...??
For a long time I subscribed to several word-of-the-day email lists, and any word I found interesting would go into my writing. I particularly liked the one with archaic words. (“carking” made it into That Demon Life). But imagery can be constructed with basic words, too....
I read Lord of the Rings when I was in the 6th grade and I wanted to do what Tolkien was doing. A year later I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and it changed everything in my life....
I’ve had a few poems published, though not many. I tend toward narrative poems—stories that have been stripped down to 14 or so lines....
The writer should always interrogate themselves about how they are using the character who is unlike them. Is the writer appropriating a story? Is the writer stereotyping or exploiting?
The first step should always be empathy. And empathy doesn’t come naturally, you have to work for it and learn it.
This is something I do not know! I’ve had students who are game writers—I assume there are books written about game-writing how-to and theory....
When I started I was in a class like you all, and I just wrote the story as it came out. I did a LOT of reading outside of the classes—I went to the Best American Story shelf in the library and worked through about 40 years or so, and I subscribed to multiple literary magazines. And I wrote a lot, which is also a way of learning. And as I learned more I became more methodical—planning the story with—yes—outlines, and focusing on revision rather than generation....
I started calling myself a writer fairly late—probably about the time I got the Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Even though I’d been writing for a long time, that was a big external validation....
Keep them simple—only describe what the focal character is seeing/experiencing....
