Answers Without Questions

Answers Without Questions

Conversations about Writing and Creativity

Lowell Mick White

Alamo Bay Press

Seadrift•Austin

Copyright © 2024 by Lowell Mick White

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover Art: "Georgia O’Keeffe, Hands and Horse Skull" by Alfred Steiglitz. Art Institute of Chicago

Author Photograph: LMW

Book Design: BTP

For orders and information:

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ISBN: 978-1-943306-27-5

For Florence Davies

Answers Without Questions

Epigraph 7

Introduction: About Answers Without Questions 8

1. Be Patient with Yourself 11

2. You Can Do a Lot with Human Emotions 14

3. Like Everything Else, It Will Come with Practice 17

4. So Much of What is Considered Success is Luck 21

5. Guilt Won’t Get Your Book Written 24

6. Just Keep Going Down One Path or Another 27

7. We Are All Complicated! 32

8. Cultivate Humility and Patience 35

9. Just Put Down Words One After Another After Another 39

10. Experimenting is Part of the Process 42

11. Knowledge is Good! 45

12. Try Pushing Ahead 49

13. Happy Endings Should Be Earned 52

14. You’re Writing about People 55

15. Your Characters are Hungry 58

16. Being Influenced is a Good Thing 61

17. All Your Ideas Have Potential 64

18. It’s All Things You Can Learn 67

19. Your Heart is Original 70

20. Dodge Around the Internal Editor 73

21. How a Text Means, Not What a Text Means 76

22. Write for Yourself 79

23. What You are Writing is Good Enough 82

24. Rehabilitate Your Darlings! 85

25. Don’t Give Up So Easily 88

26. You Will Fix the Flaws in Revision 91

27. Make Your Characters Half-Crazy and Wholly Odd 94

28. There is Always a Way to Write Something... 97

29. Surprise is a Very Low Level of Discourse 100

30. Everything Gets Better With Practice 103

31. Lower Your Standards 106

32. Just Be Kind 109

33. Your True Self 112

34. Don’t Be Safe 115

35. It’s Better Just to Fix the Flaws 118

36. Political is Good 122

37. Don’t Make the Reader Do the Writer’s Work 125

38. No More Cheesy Than You Want it to Be 128

39. WRITE BANNED BOOKS! 131

40. Choose by What’s in Your Heart 134

41. Some People are Going to Hate Your Writing 137

42. Make the Story Better 140

43. Read and Understand the World 143

44. Daylight’s Burning 146

Reading List 149

Acknowledgements 159

About Lowell Mick White 160

Epigraph

It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense.

—Anton Chekhov

The writer is an explorer.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction: About Answers Without Questions

Years and years ago, when I was a blockheaded grad student, I was teaching a composition class and I put together a super-complicated essay prompt and presented it to the students. They just sort of stared at me. I asked if they had any questions.

There were no questions.

That was absurd. I mean, I wrote the stupid prompt, and I had questions! There had to be questions. So I had the students write down whatever questions they had about the assignment, and pass their questions to the front of the classroom.

And it turned out that, yeah, they had some questions—very useful questions that they were apparently too shy or intimidated to ask orally.

⁂

Like just about all schools, my university shut down for the virus in March 2020, and after spring break we brought our classes back on Zoom.

I’d never taught a class on Zoom before—had never even been on it until I’d had a pandemic happy hour chat with a friend the week before classes resumed. I was faced with the interesting and somewhat anxiety-inducing problem of holding a creative writing class in this new environment, and after pondering on it for a bit, I decided that questions were the solution. Written questions, and answers.

After the composition class years ago, I’d continued doing this in my literature classes as a way of getting discussions going, and it seemed to work. Maybe it would work even better with creative writing on Zoom! So I got on our Learning Management System—we were still using Blackboard then—and I set up a weekly discussion assignment and called the assignment a Participation Question. I posed the prompt:

Please ask a serious question about the readings or about writing or about the class....

The questions were due early in the week, and students would write and post their questions. Then I’d write out answers, and in the Wednesday or Thursday Zoom classes I’d go over questions and the answers and elaborate if necessary and tell stories and try to be profound.

That’s the origin of this book. Answers Without Questions is the result of four long semesters and a couple of summer sessions—14 or so classes, mostly entry-level creative writing classes but with an advanced fiction class and few lit classes mixed in, with enrollments ranging from 15 to 40 students per class.

These are the answers I gave to the questions. But the questions themselves…I got rid of them. For one thing, I didn’t have the permission of all the young scholars to use their writing/questions. For another…the lack of context in the answers adds a level of mystery and ambiguity, at least to me.

You will definitely notice some repetition in my answers. That’s because, over the course of two years, many questions got asked more than once. Sometimes many times more than once. I’ve just tried to stay more or less consistent in my answers.

⁂

One of the sad repetitions you’ll find here is the Shelby Hearon never the book in your head anecdote. Shelby was a novelist and was my first creative teacher back in spring semester, 1979. Our class was called Regional Writers, and was offered not by the English Department but by the American Studies Department. I was a bone-stupid kid and didn’t know what to expect. We met in a seminar room on the third floor of Garrison Hall at the University of Texas, and the moment Shelby entered the room and sat down at the head of the table and opened her mouth, I was—changed.

Awhile back, doing some post-pandemic cleaning and sorting, I came across one of my notebooks from that time. On one page I wrote

It’s never the book in your head!

Shelby said that. (Not in class, actually. My memory is that we were in an elevator over at the Ransom Center, going to see a speaker). And she repeated, emphasized the word Never. I remembered this and wrote it in my notebook because what she said made perfect sense to me, then and now—that the book (story, poem, essay, whatever) exists perfect and pristine in the safety of your brain, but by the time it’s miraculously transformed into physical existence, it’s become something different. There’s no predicting whether the final creative artifact will be better or worse than the one in your head, but you can guarantee that it’ll be different.

⁂

So, anyway, to return to and apply Shelby’s Wisdom: this is not the book that was in my head when I was thinking about a book. But it is the book that came out of my fingers into a keyboard and computer, and eventually onto some paper, and that will have to be enough. It’s a sort of record of some of the things we did and do in my creative writing classes, and on that level it might be useful.

LMW

1. Be Patient with Yourself

We live in a world where all the stories have been written except the one you’re about to write.

You’re a young writer, so I would advise you to try different things, to try different methods, to not overthink the perfect balance, to spend time discovering how you see the world and finding out what works for you right now....

Plot is probably just not that important at this point. Writing is what is important. And most short stories do not have rising action, etc. Though things happen.

Six to eight pages is a very compact narrative space.

That said, you can do a lot in six pages....

Maybe start by making a more-or-less usable outline before you write? It’s good to know where you’re starting from....

Character and setting are both more important than plot. Come up with them first.

Name the place. Always (almost always?) name the place. Examine your surroundings. Use Google streets. And Google in general. Creative writers do research!

This might sound sarcastic, but I’m totally serious: try writing a relationship story about two people who are not attractive and sparkly but are (like most of us) clunky and awkward. Things don’t have to work out for them!

Observe your friends who are in relationships—what do they do? How do they behave? Use that material.

You’re writing a story, not an idea. Nobody wants to read a concept.

Me, I go with a lot of dialogue—probably too much dialogue. But then I will slow things down with more exposition.

The best book I’ve ever read on writing is The Midnight Disease, by Alice Flaherty.

I keep going hard because I know I won’t live long enough to tell all the stories I know. Got to get them on the page while I can.

But also look at the stories we read—they are all fine.

Those weird dialogue commas are annoying but necessary (unless you’re Cormac McCarthy).

You don’t have to worry about those when you write an essay…mostly…which is why they seem weird when you suddenly start writing fiction.

You can learn this. It just takes practice....

Me—sure, I’m an oddball. I’m a writer.

My job is to bear witness to the