{"id":33,"date":"2008-06-19T18:35:30","date_gmt":"2008-06-19T22:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=33"},"modified":"2015-05-14T06:16:21","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T10:16:21","slug":"writing-on-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/writing-on-purpose\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing on Purpose"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1stI<\/span>n the summer of 1990, I took my first steps away from a soft-cubicled work day. I had some money available, and my employer at the time offered an extended-leave-without-pay benefit that I decided would fit me just fine for a year, anyhow. I was desperate, see, to learn if I really could write — not just for my eyes and my family’s and friends’, but for the eyes of complete strangers.<\/p>\n

(There was a secondary purpose, too — what I once described as my potatoes-in-a-colander purpose. I may write about that later. Not now.)<\/p>\n

As I’ve written before<\/a>, by then I’d been subscribing to the Compuserve Information Service, or CIS, for a couple years. There I’d “met” people from all across the country, especially writerly sorts of people. A lot of them gave me a lot of good ideas where I might want to live during my year’s experiment.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t familiar with many of these places (sheltered life to that point, dontcha know: 40 years in New Jersey, and that was about it). So I opted to take a week or two simply to visit the ones that seemed most interesting. And then I’d decide.<\/p>\n

At the top of the list was a small city in Oregon. I didn’t move there, as it happened. But I figured as long as I was going to be on the west coast, I might as well make a real trip of it. Happily, <\/a>another of my CIS acquaintances would be running a weekend writing workshop in southern California, at the very start of the trip.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

T<\/span>hat acquaintance’s name was — ha ha, still is — David Gerrold. A well-respected writer of science fiction (that’s the cover of one of his earliest books at the top of this post), David had impressed my wannabe-writer’s mind with the astringency and wit of his comments on the LitForum board, which he sort of lobbed into the conversation just before wandering away for a couple weeks. (After which he’d toss in another one, without breaking stride, making me wonder if he’d just been lurking the whole time.)<\/p>\n

Anyway<\/em>, on the side David also ran an occasional workshop — the one I signed up for — called “Writing on Purpose.” And it was, as they say, a mind-blower.<\/p>\n

Aside from the title, I took away from the workshop primarily two things.<\/p>\n

First, what was practically the workshop’s mantra:<\/p>\n

Ask the next question.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By that, David meant — literally — that as you write your novel or short story, you ask yourself any and all questions you can think of<\/em> about the story. Not all of it will end up in the finished work. But you must be able to know your characters and your story sufficiently well that no matter what question might come up in a reader’s mind, what does<\/em> appear in the finished work supports a plausible answer.<\/p>\n

(Which was the other, unspoken, half of the mantra: Know how to answer any of those questions<\/em>. A reader — an editor, say — might suddenly ask you out of the blue, “Now why did Character A do that?” Or even something really elementary like, “What was she wearing when she went out that day?” If the question stopped you cold, if you couldn’t even toss off some reasonable, improvised-on-the-spot response, then you simply didn’t know your own work — your own PURPOSE — well enough.)<\/p>\n

And finally, David said, you will run out of questions. That’s when your story is done.<\/p>\n

The other thing I got from the workshop, the really mind-altering thing, was the experience of a little exercise which David walked us through on Sunday, the course’s last day.<\/p>\n

In it, he dimmed the lights. He had us close our eyes as well, and relax, adopt an easy posture, one which would not become a distraction over the next 15 or 20 minutes (or however long it took). And then he proceeded to demonstrate to us how the “Ask the next question” mantra could open up our writing universes, our writing minds<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What he did was recite a long series of questions interspersed with gentle imperatives. For instance (this isn’t a transcript, just want to give you for now a sense of how it went):<\/p>\n