Friday Write #130

asking good questions

Have you ever hated anyone? If so, why and for how long?

Would you add one year to your life if it meant taking one year from the life of someone in the world selected at random? Would it matter if you were told whose life you had shortened?

When you tell a story, do you often exaggerate or embellish it?

Would you be willing to have horrible nightmares every night for a year if you would be rewarded with extraordinary wealth?

Can you pee in front of another person?

These are a handful of head-scratchers from The Book of Questions, a small point-of-purchase volume in fairly wide circulation during my long-ago adolescence. I would’ve said that the idea seems uniquely late-80s (per the publisher, the book “invites people to explore the most fascinating of subjects: themselves…”), but it was reissued a decade ago, and last year my daughter was horrified to be asked similar questions at a friend’s dinner table. (Not the peeing one—the moral choices ones.)

I don’t know how much a person can learn about themselves or someone else by considering whether or not they’d be willing to have one of their fingers surgically removed if it somehow guaranteed immunity from all major diseases. But what sort of questions are good get-to-know-you (or get-to-know-yourself, or get-to-know-your-character) questions?

Heidi Julavits writes about a question she liked in Folded Clocks, her sort-of diary (“sort of” because it’s not chronological; it’s also far more artful than a real diary in that each entry is a kind of essay, and there’s a kind of poetic, fractal order to them):

Today I went drinking with a former student who asked me, “Are you proud of your hands?” I thought what a good question this was. As a professor, I am always struggling to ask good questions. How can a question be an invitation, not a test? Questions with answers make people scared. If you’re an up-rounder, 100 percent of possible responses to questions with answers are incorrect. The odds totally favor wrongness. Good questions can initiate a surprising wend toward an answer that is neither right nor wrong, but can be judged as strong or weak or honest or dishonest on the basis of the steps that brought the answerer there. It is a built thing. Sometimes what it builds is bullshit, but the bullshit can be so well-constructed that it has integrity, a pattern integrity. This can be worth admiring.

This reminds me that a reiki practitioner once told me that my hands were excited about being my hands, because they got to do good storytelling work. But really, that’s neither here not there.

Today, write a good question and/or a scene of someone answering one.

Or answer the student’s question, either from your POV or from that of one of your characters.

Or—why the hell not—just write about what you’re proud of.

Until next week—

Emily

My favorite food as seen in NYC, May 8. 2025