Answering Questions with Questions

Love is all questions. If you know the answers then the love affair is over. Fiction writing is very much about asking questions. John Edgar Wideman said this at a 2000 Callaloo Symposium highlighting the special issue that examined the writer’s body of work. His remarks came during a question-and-answer period like those that so often follow readings and panel discussions. Such moments give readers an opportunity to respond to the text and engage its writer. In the arc of readings and panel discussions, the questions are featured players in the final act.

It may seem strange to end a moment with a question, but it is an approach that’s fundamental to the way we present and study fiction. The Wideman Symposium discourse that began on the pages of Callaloo as essays, fiction, and interviews became a dialogue among the audience members. The event paralleled the arc of many writing workshops. The work led to questions. The questions led to conversation. The conversation helped to stimulate new ideas on craft.

Callaloo has continued to bring together voices on genre, region, and the body of work of established writers. Equally important is the work that the journal has done to bring together emerging writers who consider questions of craft as they examine their work and the work of their peers. The 2011 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop has created such a space. The workshop facilitated the harvesting of new questions, the writers’ own and those of their peers, so that they could sharpen their voices and deepen their approaches to craft.

I shared with the workshop participants a passage from Caryl Phillips’s compelling novel, Dancing in the Dark. The character Aida Walker states that “there are ten thousand things we must think of every time we make a step. . .” The line expresses the demands on a performing artist, but could be examined in the context of authorial decision making. Behind each action and every line there are the many decisions a writer must make. We must consider those “things”—subtext, history—behind each action our characters make and every word they utter. How do we distill those elements, fragments, and ideas into a finished form?

So often we discuss the tension between interiority and external action. Writers experienced a similar dynamic in the workshop environment. The narrative that had lived in the writer’s mind became something that filled the space, discussed aloud by peers. The writers heard their words read by other writers. They listened as their ideas were filtered through a different aesthetic approach. Writers established trust in a room filled with strangers. We strove for a dynamic where new voices quickly became familiar and respected, and the writers benefited from the collective exchange. The Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop participants succeeded in challenging themselves, giving their old and new questions agency within their processes.

The craft of fiction begins and ends in rooms of each writer’s choosing. The majority of the labor happens in private places where writers are alone with the work and their voices. I am thankful for the writers who savor the collective moment of the workshop where both instructors and writers learn and grow through the exchange.

Workshops are not answer factories, and stories are not simply solved. There will always be questions, but our questions should grow sharper and stronger along with our prose. Our prose is as strong as the questions we ask ourselves as we write and revise. Thankfully, the questions abound and will do so as the writing journeys continue.