Creative Questions

Were you good in school? Did you know how to answer the questions the teacher asked you? I was one of those kids. I hated to fail at anything, so there was that, but my mind also seemed pretty good at absorbing instruction and retaining information. It’s useful sometimes in life outside of school, particularly, I suspect, if you’re a lawyer or a doctor or a CPA. Not quite so much if you’re a writer. The questions we’re expected to answer in school are largely factual questions. There’s but one right answer, and it’s the student’s job to give it.

Nothing wrong with factual questions. When I was twenty-one, I wanted to write music. I’d bought a keyboard, but I couldn’t understand how to translate what I was hearing in my head through that instrument. I’d played the flute for years, so I knew how read music, but I knew nothing about music theory. I didn’t know what it meant to be in a specific key or what a chord was. So, I wandered down to a music store a bought slim book on theory, and after 30 minutes of reading, I was on my way.

What that book couldn’t show me, however, was what to write. That was a creative question, which are the most important questions not just for artists, but to everyone who’s ever wondered what they should do with themselves, or why they aren’t happy, or who they should date. A creative question is one to which only you have the answer. Only you know the ending to your story, and only you know who you love and what you love – and love, of course, the is most creative force in the universe.

We get into trouble when we treat our creative questions as factual, as if we’re still in school trying to get the right answers. Success in that setting, after all, depended on knowing facts, which, useful though they are, are entirely neutral. They are neither good nor bad, living nor dead. Love is anything but neutral. It’s all energy, all movement, a force forever looking to make more of itself. Ask yourself a creative question, and you invite it and unleash it, and the world and your life are better for it.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com