The Question That Could Change Everything You Believe—Do You Know Yours?

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…