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.

Finding the Writer's Heart: Ten Rules for A New Kind of Writing Group

“Clarity is everything,” Confucius is reported to have said, and, though he was certainly not a writer in any modern sense, he may as well have been, considering how writers have, down the

ages, echoed his thoughts.  “I always thought,” said Bertoldt Brecht, “the very simplest words must be enough - when I say the way things really are, people’s hearts must be torn to shreds.”  Or Hemingway’s admonition to “write hard and clear about what hurts.”

Note the focus from these writers on the emotional, on the heart.  “Fill your paper,” Wordsworth said, “with the breathings of your heart.”   Maya Angelou tells us that “the idea is to write it so that...it slides right through the brain and straight to the heart.”

Clarity, clarity, clarity.  Heart, heart, heart.  If all writers could find and keep these qualities, then we would never have to browse the bookstore, in desperate search for something that would not bore or repel us.   Every book we picked up would slide right through our brains and into our hearts.  But, like everything in the world, it is, of course, not this simple.  So writers seek help in the company of their fellows - they join writing groups or have writing buddies or critic-pals, or use paid professional services to seek through the drafts of what they’ve written for that spark, that thing that will lead both writer and reader to the heart.  What they get back, more often than not, is line-editing, suggestions for sentence structure, observations about logistical problems in the movement of a scene, or the structure of their plot.  All that is essential to the craft of the writer, but not to the writer’s heart.  And if the writer’s heart and soul are not in the work, then what’s the point?

What happens in most writing groups, writing classes, and critic-partnerships is a focus on technique.  That is fine.  It’s not only fine, it’s essential, but it is not the thing that makes a great writer, or a great piece of writing.   To do their best work, writers must move beyond technique, to find that clarity, that deep sense in their hearts that moves them toward clarity in their work and on the page.  

What I propose is a new model for writer’s groups that is based on the Quaker practice of Clearness Committees.  As those communities use it, it is a space among trusted fellows were a person with a problem can be  helped towards the answer.  As a structure for a writer’s group, it will be radically different from any such group you have ever tried, and I have tried many, many.  The use of this model will be, much like its Quaker counterpart, based on a single assumption, and a set of rules.  While our assumptions and rules will differ in details, the substance will be the same.  Our assumption:   every writer - every writer- has within their self a singular spot of truth and meaning, that simply needs to be accessed and acknowledged to help them to be the best writers that they can.  

To bring this assumption into an effective writing group, three things are required:  1) the set of rules;  2) a clear understanding of the spatial/environmental requirements; and 3) an understanding of what an ‘open, honest question’ is.   

Here is how a writer’s group, based on the Clearness Committee model, works:  each meeting has one person as the “author.”  That person may (or may not) bring an actual piece of writing, and may choose to have her group read it ahead of time, or may choose to have them proceed with the

group without having read the piece the author is working on.  In preparation, the writer will identify what their most significant problem is with the piece.  Is it the development of the main character?  The structure?  The flow of the story?  This should not be influenced by what others may think of the piece, or what others have told you that you should be concerned about.  Rather:  what does not feel right?  Then, you can choose to write that down, either for yourself, or for the group.  You do not need to provide such a piece of writing for the group, but you would find it will be very valuable to you as the focus of the group.

When the group convenes, the author sits in the center of a half-circle, or, if using a table, at the head, where the author can easily see all and be seen by all.  The group should have identified, ahead of time, a facilitator and someone to record the session, either in notes or a sound recording.  At the beginning, the facilitator reminds everyone of the rules, monitors to be sure, as the meeting progresses, that people are abiding by the agreements that the rules impy,  and the monitor also ends the meeting on time.  

Adapted from the rules used by the Quaker community for their communal problem solving, here are the rules for Finding The Writer’s Heart:

1. All aspects -- all aspects -- of the meeting are entirely confidential.  You may never, outside of the meeting, discuss any words, advice, questions, answers, or readings encountered during the meeting, unless given permission by the author who is the focus.
2. The author prepares (either in writing or mentally) a statement of what their NEED is for the current piece they are writing.  In preparation of this, think also of what hunches you have about the solution, what resistance you feel, what you think could/should happen next.
3. The meeting lasts for three hours, with a single author as focus, a facilitator, and a recorder.
4. Begin the meeting with a time of silence, allowing the author who is the object of the meeting to focus and clarify mentally.  The author speaks to begin the meeting whenever they are fully ready to begin.  Others should remain silent until then.
5. The author states what the problem is,  what is the challenge, and the hunches they have.  When the author is done, others may speak, but ONLY to ask questions - NO ADVICE GIVING. NO SUGGESTIONS.   NO OBSERVATIONS.  The only speaking allowed among the group are OPEN, HONEST QUESTIONS.  
6. What is an “Open, Honest Question?”  The best way to define an open honest question is the type of question that the asker could not POSSIBLY know the answer to, and no answer is implied by the question itself.  (Further information about open, honest questions in the next post).  The GOAL of these questions is to help lead the author to FIND THE ANSWER IN THEMSELVES.   An open, honest, question is brief and to the point.   It is not leading.  It does not imply that you know the answer.  You don’t.  You need to help the author find the answer they already know.
7. The author can respond to questions or decide to pass.  If the author takes time to respond, WAIT - DO NOT PROD THE AUTHOR.
8. The questions should NEVER become grilling, or rapid-fire.  Respect the author’s space and trust the silence needed to get to the right answer.
9. During the course of the meeting, it is the job of others ONLY to ask questions, and to remain completely focused on the author.  If there are silences while the author thinks, waits for the next question, everyone should remain focused on that author - no joking or side conversations or fidgeting.    If any of these protocols are broken, it is the job of the facilitator to remind all of the rules and get the meeting back on track.
10. The meeting should go the full allotted time - DO NOT QUIT because you think you’ve “run out of questions” -- dig deeper.

Neither the author nor the group should assume that one meeting will help the author to clarity, to the solution needed.  It may, but multiple meetings may also be needed.  This kind of writing group is clearly more time-intensive than the typical read-a-few-pages-share-commentary-move-to-the-next-writer model.  It requires commitment.  However, having experienced (as what the Quakers call “the focus person”) Clearness Committees, I can promise you that the results will be much deeper than anything you’ve experienced in a writing group to date.

Two more things are required to practice this form of Clearness for writers:   the foundations of the environment, rooted in accepting six paradoxes of human nature, and a clear understanding of (and practice with) “open, honest questions.”   These two will follow in the next post.

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Much credit and thanks to:  first, Parker Palmer, the Quaker philosopher, writer, and educator who founded The Center for Formation in the Community College, with which I was privileged to train for five years;  second, all the members of the various Clearness Committees in which I have participated.  I highly recommend reading Palmer’s “Let Your Life Speak” in preparation for this work.  My handbook for writer’s group to use this method will be available for free on my website within one month of the final post on this method (the next post in this series).

3 WAYS TO BE ETHICAL IN YOUR WRITING - OR - How to Love your Grandma even after she's gone

NOTE: I know that this post was supposed to be about using the Clearness Committee process for a writing group, and I have that post almost ready, I promise, in a day or two.  Today, though, other thoughts took over.

I am thinking today of a rather remarkable woman named Hermine Bozeanna Merker Forhan.  Born in Dux, Bohemia, she came to this country by way of Canada, and settled in the high mountains of Montana on a homestead she worked with her Irish-born husband, Billy Forhan. She spoke little English, and even years later when I (among the youngest of her many many grandchildren) knew her, she struggled with the language.

She was slight in stature, strong in spirit, gentle in nature.  She worked incredibly hard, suffering the loss of three of her children, the loss of her husband, and challenging and uncomfortable changes in the world around her - all faced with the softest, kindest eyes I have yet to encounter in my own

Hermine Bozeanna Merker (center)

increasingly long life.  I grew up listening to her heavily-accented voice talking, almost daily, over coffee with my mother - listening to her stories of Bohemia, listening to her laugh, watching her eyes sparkle, watching the weariness that lay heavier on her shoulders year after year, particularly as her memory began to go.  She died when I was away at college, and it had been some time since I had seen her.  

It occurs to me that few these days have the experience of direct exposure to someone like her in their childhood or in their lives.  She was an immigrant (one who might not make it into the country these days, and certainly one many pundits and wannabes would like to see kept out) - but she was also one of those who built this country.  A tiny woman, a powerful heart.  I won’t speak here of the conditions she faced when she fled her home country, or the challenges she overcame here.  I am thinking today of her, and of words.  I was in my garden with a friend recently and she said, “look - some plants are coming

up...some….”  …. And I said, “nasty-turtiums.”  She looked at me strangely, and I said, “Nasturtiums - it was what my grandmother called them….nasty-turtiums.”

“Didn’t she like them?”

“She loved them - it was just how she said the word.”

It hit me later how much of my long-lost grandmother has stayed with me -- the comfort in the memory of her kindness, the strength in the memory of her spirit, and even the humor of how she found her way around the language, and her own way to remember difficult words.  Like ‘nasturtium.’  I am fortunate (all of us in my over-large family are) to have known her, to have heard her stories, to have been exposed to her strength and the rich and meaningful arc of her life.  Not all are so fortunate.

Any time I think of good fortune, I am reminded by my upbringing (thank you to both Hermine and my mother, Margaret Ann) to remember also the obligations that good fortune brings - and this brings me to the relevance to writers.  In any fortune that we have - good or bad - we are ethically bound to honor it in our writing, lest we become merely hacks.  Here are the ways that I think we must, if we dare to call ourselves truly writers, meet our obligations to the past:

1. Honor the past.  Honor your past.   This is not simply avoiding the admonition that you might otherwise be doomed to repeat it - it is also a soul-deep obligation to be thankful for the gifts that past gives to you.  Whatever values, whatever skill, whatever inherent generational/genetic gifts it brought to you, those should be reflected in your writing.  My ancestors were all working people - homesteaders, brewmasters, bakers, seamstresses, nannies, railroad conductors, auto mechanics, cooks.  They worked hard - sometimes rewarded for that, sometimes cheated because of it, but always performed their work with pride.  They were honest, they loved to laugh, they cared more than anything about family.  Always I find the theme of the dignity of working people surfacing in my writing, and, each time I notice that, I feel gratitude for the past I have, that I was given.
2. Work as hard as your ancestors did.  Not one bit less.  Whatever they did, whatever they were, it meant, to one degree or another, working for it.  No skimping, no slacking, no sense of entitlement.  Pour that into your writing.  Never let a draft go out without carefully considering every element, every word, every transition, character, and scene.  Find the perfection that your grandmother found in every cross-stitch, that your father took in every polished piece of wood.  Do not be sloppy - your grandparents - and your readers - deserve better.
3. Do not forget.  Tell the truth.  One of the hardest things for working-class people, for people from oppressed groups, to hear is “you have forgotten where you come from.”  It is hard, because it cuts to the core of who you are, and so much in our culture urges us to break away from our roots, to become better than. It is a choice, this breaking away,  and not one you are required to make.  It is entirely possible to become the best writer you can be, and still be the child of your parents, of your culture.  Do not let it go.  Do not bury it.  Tell the truth about it - this is how literature is made. If your goal is to write pulp/popular fiction, then do that - but do it within the truth of the past you know, not some fantasized past.  

There are many ethical obligations in our world - certainly those obligations abound in our current climate, and no less for the writer.  If nothing else, as writers and as human beings, we have the obligation to honor those who got us, for good or ill, to where we now are.  

A New Approach to Writing Groups

Several years ago, I was the focus of a group called a “Clearness Committee.”  In a Clearness Committee, the “focus person” is both the luckiest member, and the one most on the spot.  The “focus person” is generally the one who convenes a clearness committee, because they have a problem to solve, or a decision to make, and are struggling.  In advance of the meeting, the focus person writes up their problem in as much detail as possible and gives it, ahead of

The Mabel Dodge Lujan House in Taos, New Mexico
Where my Clearness Training took place

time, to each member.   In the meeting itself, once it convenes, the members of the committee are only allowed to ask questions, not to comment or advise, and the focus person may either answer, or pass on a question.  Those who attend such meetings usually have training ahead of time, and the questions may only be what are called “Open Honest Questions” designed to help the focus person examine their own thoughts and feelings - never should the questions be leading, or advice masquerading as a question.  That is, no such questions as “Have you tried X?” - or - “Don’t you think the real problem is Y?”  Learning to ask only  open, honest questions is the real challenge in participating in a clearness committee, and takes a lot of practice.  The challenge for the focus person is to be as honest and thoughtful as possible with herself and the members, and to be ready to face thoughts and feelings that may be uncomfortable.

I volunteered to be the focus person for a group in training for Clearness Committees (as I was in training as well) because I was having a problem with a troublesome coworker.  I wrote up as much detail as I could, submitted it, and showed up for the committee meeting.  I had participated myself as a member several times, as all of us in this training were fairly advanced in the process, and had participated in several such committees as well as workshops and discussion groups.  I was prepared.  I thought.

There were, inevitably, a few questions which felt less than completely open, as though they were trying to lead you to an answer preferred by the questioner, and, in those instances you can (and I did) quietly say that’s how the question felt, and the group would move on to the next questioner.  The majority of  questions, though, were thought-provoking and revelatory.  I found myself facing ownership of more of the problem that I had previously realized, and, for the rest of it, realizing the best course was simple forgiveness and letting go.  I was never again distressed or concerned over the troublesome coworkers behavior, which continued unchanged, but which no longer felt relevant to my own job, even though her ire was quite clearly directed at me.

Recent life events have had me reflecting on that experience, and the need for that kind of focused clarity as I go forward in my life.  In addition, I was struck by how much I would like to have a writing group that functioned like a clearness committee - helping me to mine my own goals for a piece, explore the characters as they exist in my mind, and uncover the depth of purpose for a story I’m crafting.  I’ve been in many writing groups, and, as long time readers of this blog will recognize, there is at least one group, though I am no longer attending, that I dearly love.  Such groups, though, tend to practice essentially the same - a piece of writing is either submitted ahead of time, or brought to the group, the group reads and marks, and then gives line editing feedback, pointing out logistical errors or point of view problems, and reflecting on the construction of character, or the mood, or the arc of the story.

What if a writing group abandoned that, and simply asked the author questions, open honest questions, challenging her to mine her own intentions, her own purpose, her own goals for the story, in order to hone them, and hone it to a fine point, to it’s own ultimate clarity?  

In the following two blog posts, I am going to explore  a) the structure of Clearness Committees and how they could effectively function for a writing group, and b) the process of structuring (and answering) open, honest questions, again in the context of how this could work for story/character/theme development for authors.

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END NOTE:  Clearness Committees are a regular practice of Quaker Communities.  I became exposed to them through three years of training in a group developing Formation practices for Higher Education - adapting Quaker spiritual guidance processes to the development of authentic educators and pedagogy.  This practice and the training was begun by Quaker author/philosopher/educator Parker Palmer, and I am forever grateful to him for introducing me to a way of thinking which enriched my life, widened my mind, and calmed my spirit.