Write with a question in mind, not an answer
Because it's the questions that offer endless possibilities
Now that I’ve handed in the latest draft of When She Was Gone, and I’m waiting for the editorial feedback (eek!), I’m turning my attention to what I might do next. Apart from planning umpteen new Substack posts (because this has quickly become my favourite online space) and having a go at writing a children’s book (more on that in another post), I have three different novels that I could start working on: a standalone psychological suspense thriller, another story featuring my main character Rose in When She Was Gone, or the sequel to The Hush. I have solid ideas for all of these, but everything is in the very early stages of development, so I’m spending a lot of time thinking and asking myself questions around character, themes and plot. Hopefully, these will slowly condense into one or two central questions that underpin each story from start to finish.
I’ve long known that one of the keys to writing good fiction is staying open to the possibilities within the story, allowing it to breathe, twist and turn. However, I hadn’t begun to articulate this process succinctly, until I heard Brit Bennett (author of The Mothers and The Vanishing Half) speaking at an online event, and advising her fellow authors to, ‘Write with a question in mind, not an answer’. This advice sounds simple but it’s deceptive, because staying open to your central question(s) requires the willingness to venture into uncomfortable spaces, to challenge your own ideas and certainties, to go down blind alleys and recognise them as such, to re-write a LOT, and to pare back and go deeper into whatever is needed to get to the heart of your story.
Sometimes this process remains murky for a long time, and the writing itself slowly reveals and defines the question (and during this phase it is entirely normal to panic, cry, mainline chocolate and bang your head - gently - against the wall). In academia this is called ‘practice-led research’, and it was part of my process when writing The Hush for my PhD. I didn’t have a fully developed research question for years, and one of the privileges of the work was being able to study and read around my amorphous ideas, and to find so many incredible academic research pieces and fictional texts, all of which helped to shape my own work and pin down my central question (which ended up as, How does the contemporary Young Adult (YA) dystopian narrative reappropriate Western cultural ideologies of motherhood and represent the mother–daughter relationship?).
I don’t usually write down my central questions for each novel, I just record them more generally as ‘themes’. I’m not sure why – perhaps there’s something constricting about fixing them in stone, particularly when I’m often asking other secondary questions in subplots. However, looking back, here’s how I’d define some of the key questions in my previous novels:
How does a single traumatic event resonate across different people’s lives? (Come Back to Me, 2010)
What would it mean if we were to respect animal lives as equitable to humans? (Shallow Breath, 2012)
What is the effect of social media on teenagers, and its impact on family relationships? (All That is Lost Between Us, 2014)
How do different multigenerational, familial and collegial relationships between women inform their responses to oppressive regimes? (The Hush, 2021)
These questions might sound super-serious, but the books that develop from them are not staid texts (at least, I hope not!) but ambitious psychological suspense thrillers. I want to take my readers on an exciting ride, and I also want to rework theoretical research and enfold it into my stories to keep them fresh, challenging and accessible. At all times I need to strive to keep my mind open to possibility. For example, as soon as I settle into any steadfast, narrow opinion on any of my characters, hero or villain, it begins to feel wrong and reductive. There are so many intriguing layers to a person’s identity, and the best stories always capture this complexity: even Darth Vader has a multifaceted back story! In fact, some amazing moments in storytelling come when a character does something so surprising, so unsettling, that it twists your interpretation of who that person really is. (Two great examples of this in psychological suspense fiction are Rosamund Lupton’s Sister and Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient.)
So what becomes of these questions if all stories must reach a conclusion, and a novel needs a satisfying ending? This is also a challenge, as while my characters do learn, grow and change by the end of each story, I don’t look to reduce any of the questions around them down to any simple, straightforward, singular answer (in my mind there rarely is such a thing). Rather, I hope that I resolve the plot well, while weaving enough intrigue into the themes of the story to encourage readers to continue processing their own ideas after they put the book down. I don’t want to tell a story to the reader so much as to offer my stories for us to share, leaving plenty of space for interpretation and conversation.
I’m going to try to get into the Chat more regularly, but I’m still figuring all this out! If my posts spark anything you’d like to chat about please leave a comment here, or if you have more general questions about writing I’m always happy to answer them.