Description
In the anniversary edition of Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes, “My journey began with a series of questions. That’s how all journeys begin. The shape of my journey was a reflection of my own personal answers to those questions. The shape of your journey will be different from mine, but at bottom, our questions will be the same. These are not easy questions by the way. They are merely the biggest and oldest questions of any human life.”
These “essential questions” are critically important not only to memoir writers, but to all writers of prose, regardless of genre. In fact, Gilbert credits her essential question—what if my life belonged to me?—with the wild success of her memoir. She believes the book owes its popularity to those millions of readers who “used this story as a permission slip to ask themselves their own questions—often for the first time in their lives.”
In this workshop, we will:
- Define the essential question
- Enumerate why essential questions are such an important tool to engage readers
- Offer a list of some universal, archetypal questions that may guide our work
- Provide examples of essential questions from popular works of fiction and memoir
- Suggest strategies for the placement of essential questions in our work
