Writer's Circle - Asking Open Honest Questions

NOTE:  This is the third and final installation in the series of three posts I’ve put up about a new method for writing groups.  The two others (A New Approach to Writing Groups - posted on June 7th - and Finding the Writer's Heart: Ten Rules for A New Kind of Writing Group - posted on July 30th.)  All three of these will soon be combined into one document available for free for download.  

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Using questions to explore for the truth is a tradition as old as human culture.  The Socratic method, used in ancient Greece, used questions to prove and push students to reasoned

argument and critical thinking.  In courtrooms, lawyers use a series of questions to probe for the truth from witnesses.  In education, a reformer named Paulo Freire used a method called problem-posing - the question of a problem familiar to students - to motivate student learning.  Writing teachers frequently use a list of questions to stimulate discussions in student peer feedback groups. The Quakers use a process called Clearness Committees, asking a series of questions, to help solve problems and conflicts in their communities.

It is this last that I have relied on most heavily in creating these guidelines for the “open, honest questions” to use in the Writing Circles process I propose.  

I strongly recommend that participants practice the process with each other without an author in the center - evaluating each question in the practice session to see how it fits the guidelines for open honest questions before actually trying it with a writer’s actual problem.

Writing Circle Guidelines for Open Honest Questions.

1. The simplest way to define an open, honest question is that the person asking the question could not possibly know the answer to it.  No potential answers are implied by the question, no hidden advice is contained in the question.  The point is to get the author to explore within him/herself for answers.  Examples:  If you read back over your story (or novel or poem) right now, at what point would it start to feel wrong to you?  What feels wrong about it?
2. Open honest questions are not yes/no questions.
3. Try to use some of the words the writer used in expressing her/his problem in order to dig deeper or expand thoughts.  Examples:  Can you say why you think the main character is not acting right?   Can you tell us more about why you said that the story feels wrong for the message you want it to convey?
4. Keep your questions short and clear - when we end up formulating long questions, it generally is us trying to “write the story for the author” - always a negative tendency for those in writing groups.  Remember that your focus here is to help the writer find his own answer within himself.  Example:  how do you want your readers to feel when they read this novel? (or story or poem)
5. If you think that a question you are about to ask has a right answer and wrong answers, don’t ask it - open, honest questions have no right or wrong answers.  They only have the writer’s answer.  Work on changing the essence of the question to something more open.  Example: (Not an open question)  Don’t you think you should re-write the opening scene to make your character stronger?  - to- (Open)  What makes your character strong?  -or-  What is the strength of your opening scene? It’s weakness?
6. Listen very closely to what the writer says about her problem, and try to find questions that seem relevant to that problem.
7. DO NOT tell stories about your own experiences with similar problems - your solutions are your solutions, not this writer’s.  REMEMBER:  in a writer’s circle, you are ONLY allowed to speak to the writer by asking open, honest questions.
8. Think of questions that use metaphors or images.  While often not obviously relevant to the writer’s problem, metaphors and images help the creative mind to work.   Examples:  If this novel were an animal, which animal would it be?  If your main character were running off on an adventure, where would she go?
9. If you feel curious about something the writer has said, think carefully and consider not asking about the source of your curiosity.  Remember, the goal here is NOT to satisfy your curiosity or get your advice - it is to help the writer find his OWN answers.
10. In the creative act, the feelings of the artist, the creator, are central.  Ask questions about feelings.  Examples:  How do you feel about your main character?  What emotions do you want to have in this story?  When you are writing the story, how do you feel?

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Very soon, I’ll be offering a free PDF combining the advice the three blogposts  on this new writing group method, which I am calling RiverWords:  Writer’s Circles.  When that PDF is available, (I am guessing about a week or ten days) I’ll put a notice here on the blog.

A Love Letter to an old 'John Bircher"

Note:  the promised final installment in the "Clearness for Writers Groups" series will be posted in a couple of days.  For now, this is what is on my mind:

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I have loved science my entire life.  No one can ever be entirely sure what starts these things - are they innate tendencies, or nurtured into existence?  Who can know?  I do know, however, that my

earliest memories of science-love go back to a neighbor who lived on the opposite side of the block from my parent’s home when I was a child.  The back entrance to his house was just across the alley from my parent’s back gate.  Early on, I simply knew him as one of the large, towering men who came to the backyard barbeques my parents would have in the summer, and the father of a teenage boy the same age as my oldest sister.  He also ran a sharpening shop out of his garage, which faced on the alley, and often I could hear the whine of the large grinders drifting up to my open window as he worked at sharpening someone’s knives or scissors or lawn mower blades.

I don’t remember how it happened - maybe his wife invited me in for cookies (not unusual for the mothers on that block) or maybe he and I talked as he worked near the open door of his shop, but, one day, I found myself standing in his living room, looking at a small wooden bookshelf filled with identical volumes - The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science.  I stared, until a voice over my shoulder asked if I’d like to see.  I nodded, and Mr. Ostroot - he of the whining sharpening blades - stepped forward, pulled a volume from the shelf, and crouched down to show it to me.  He opened the pages, and, suddenly, spread out before my nine-year-old eyes, was a panoramic picture of swirling galaxies.  

I must have gasped, or perhaps I automatically reached for the book, I don’t remember, but what I do remember is that day, and many others, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Ostroot’s living room, pouring over the pages, volume after volume, reading, touching the pictures, studying the Table of Elements until I thought - until I got home and realized I was wrong - that I had it memorized.  

I can feel the hard wood of the floor under me, my ankles crossed, a big volume in my lap, and the silk feel of the glossy pages as I turned one after another, day after day.  I would run my hand over equations that explained chemical reactions, study the pictures of molecules, looking like some smooth brightly-colored variation on tinker-toys.  I would read of archeological digs, of the evolution of  Man, of the vast distances of space.  There were times when Mrs. Ostroot had to come rouse me because she heard my mother or my older sisters calling for me as evening fell.  

All of this was at a time and in a place where girls were not encouraged to become scientists or mathematicians, no matter how good were their grades.  Mr. (and Mrs.) Ostroot cared about none of this - I was a child with a curious mind, and they were more than happy to oblige my curiosity.  All of these years later, they have my appreciation and a strange at-a-distance, through-time form of love.  

I also owe them for my love of science fiction.  During this time of cross-legged wonder with the Illustrated Encyclopedia, I was taken by one of my older sisters to the local library to get my first library card.  Wandering the stacks that day, my eye fell on a label at the end of one aisle:  Science Fiction.  All I saw was the word ‘science’ and my feet turned down the aisle.  I still remember the two

books I took home that day.  One was a young adult novel called The Forgotten Door, about travel between dimensions, and the other was an adult sci-fi novel called When Worlds Collide.  As I excitedly summarized the latter to my older sisters a few days later at the dinner table, they declared it to be “an Everyman story” - which sent me off on research into archetypes in literature that I doubt many nine-year-olds (certainly few at that time) had done.  So, in a way, Mr. & Mrs. Ostroot are also responsible for my love of literature in general, and research.

My love affair with their science encyclopedia ended a year or two later.  One day, as I sat there reading through an article on Newton’s Laws, Mr. Ostroot approached me with a plate of cookies to take home to my sisters, and a sheaf of papers - brochures - that he wanted me to give to my mother.  They were brochures from The John Birch Society.  I dutifully took it all home, and delivered both cookies and brochures as directed.  My mother, a devout liberal Democrat, glanced at the brochures and asked me where I’d gotten them, and I told her.  She asked what I was doing there, and I told her about the Encyclopedia, and how I would go read it when my other sisters were outside playing.  Her lips pressed tight, and, later that day, she pulled me aside and told me I was not to go back to the Ostroots.  Ever.  The John Birch Society, she said, was evil, and she did not want me around people who supported it.  

For some time, I mourned the loss of my beloved Encyclopedia, until one day my mother took me to the basement and showed me the dusty old case contained twenty volumes of The Book of Knowledge that she had acquired years before.  It was seriously out of date, especially as compared to the brand-new, glossy, colorful Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science, but I was mollified, and spent many a long afternoon reading those volumes, until I discovered that I could get even more up to date books on real science (and more sci-fi books as well) from the library.  I then learned to live there, and for many years, totally forgot those hours on the Ostroot’s floor with their expensive, shiny-new, beautiful volumes on the glory of science.

My mother worried about exposing my impressionable young mind to political views that clashed with what she believed was right.  In the effort, though she didn’t know it, she almost blocked my exposure to one the main sources of youthful passion:  pictures, stories, illustrations, articles, graphs explanations - all about science.  Between the library, the Book of Knowledge, and the way the works of the likes of Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, and others expanded my mind to what the world of science might some day accomplish, to the mystery and wonder and apparently unlimited potential of science for explaining the world around us.  I took (and got As in) every science course from high school through college.  Microbiology and physics, astronomy, discrete mathematics and oceanography.  It was like playing.  My love of all things scientific - the scientific method, the rule of reason and logic -  has stayed with me my entire life, and, in a variety of forms, makes its way into my writing.

The message for writers?  Whatever was your passion as a child, never lose it, or, if you have, drop everything you’re doing now, and beat a path back to it, in any way you can.  If there is anything that every writer needs to bring to their work, it is the one thing that ignites their passion.  Remember it.  Sink into it.  Let it guide you.