Question, Set, Go! Writing Prompts and Questioning in Writing Nonfiction
Start with a question. Put it front and center. Write it boldly on your page. Should you choose to lead with it after revising, you’ll captivate your reader in a flash. And by interlacing question prompts throughout your writing, you’ll get to the crux of what you truly mean to say. Even rhetorical questions beg answers. And the answer, an answer is your piece.
Where to begin? When facing the frightening blank page, the initial question can be too much to handle — broad, timeless, having eluded an absolute for ages. Dare to think big, to broach a subject that swallows up not only you, but all of humanity and the entire universe with it. This is a nonlinear journey, exploring infinite possibilities and testing, ruffling the waters of form and content. Embrace the big idea at the beginning. Believe it or not, you may end up tackling the whole thing. Or whittling it away into chunks, which you can arrange or discard as you eventually see fit. Either way, the question prompt is an instrument in your writer’s kit. It’s proven quite handy in the past.
Human rights advocate Sojourner Truth didn’t actually ask “Ain’t I a Woman?” at the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. But her original address did begin with a question, the humble “May I say a few words?” Just over a year later, abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass challenged his audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” In the Introduction to her seminal work, The Second Sex, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir claimed that “we must ask: what is a woman?” The title of Guyanese historian Walter Rodney’s most renowned book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is a question inverted to make his thesis plain.
These specific question prompts exemplify certain types that are incredibly useful for conceptualizing, developing, and revising nonfiction: the door-opener, the dialogic, the explicit, the clarifying, and the overarching. Because crystalizing the essence of a piece — a coherently complex thesis, theme, or thread — is so difficult; because looking at the big picture first can be paralyzing; and because the types I’ve proposed are loose, closely connected, and often interwoven, I’ll unpack them in nearly reverse order, narrowing from the abstract or multi-faceted to the minute and deceptively inconsequential.
Rodney’s title makes a statement of the overarching question “How did Europe underdevelop Africa?” You can almost hear the author respond with “Let me count the ways!” In fact, the Table of Contents identifies the major historical processes, impacts, and legacies that Rodney examines in chronological and thematic order. The overarching question thus presents the argument itself and the structural framework for elaborating and supporting it, a method especially useful for long-form writing. If the overarching question is not where you commence or finish, keep reading. Other types may yet come to your aid.
At a glance, Beauvoir’s clarifying question appears straightforward. Just the who, what, when, where, and why, we might think, no big deal. Yet it is! Nonfiction writers are urged to define our terms, rightly so. Probing the very words we use forces us to face the premises on which our narratives and arguments rely, not to take them for granted. As Beauvoir discovered, an attempt to answer a clarifying question can set in motion a thorough line of inquiry, unfolding in many more questions, not limited to definition.
With his explicit question, Douglass named the precise problem he interrogated. In a speech peppered with questions, this particular one was followed by the words “I answer” and a succinct explanation. An explicit question prompt is the ideal building block of a longer work, a question in a sequence of questions, each leading to the next, and perhaps to an overarching question, if you have or desire one. A scaffold of explicit questions can uphold the structure of a whole piece.
It may be off-putting to think of Truth, a Black woman, formerly enslaved, asking an overwhelmingly white audience for permission to speak during a period when all women were excluded from the body politic; the Fugitive Slave Act was federal law; and the institution of slavery dominated the South, enriched the North, and expanded to the West. But this demure act had a subtle strategic side: her door-opener question invited the public to confirm that it was willing to listen. Skillfully disarming, Truth reduced resistance or hostility to her presence for some, likely positively predisposing others.
Truth didn’t just welcome the listeners to participate in her address at its outset; she continued to pose questions throughout, such as the dialogic “Man, where is your part?” Said almost at the end of her speech, when the audience had been in conversation with her the entire time, she provoked a direct response, emphasizing her message more intimately than a questionless lecture ever could.
Not yet convinced that question prompts were made for nonfiction writing? Try them for revision. As noted, questions beget further questions and potential answers. For me, these spring to mind like a flurry of arrows shot from a single bow. We’ve seen how different types of question prompts can be stacked or intermingled with one another — a launchpad, trajectory, and destination in one. When revising, ask yourself whether you’ve answered every question you posed. If you can retrace your thinking steps nimbly, without stumbling into a void or diverging from the predicted path, the questions you formulated have worked their magic. If any of your arrows have missed their mark, it’ll become apparent. Then, you can course-correct or seek a new direction.
In short, question prompts are catalysts for generating content, tools for sharpening and organizing ideas as you draft, spurs for moving along in the writing process, not to mention blueprints for revision. And unless you decide to reveal them, they remain invisible. No one will ever know their effect, regardless of how it transformed your final, polished work of nonfiction.