Member-only story
The power of seeing only the questions in a piece of writing
I made a web tool that lets you do that.
(tl;dr — if you want to try out my web tool for seeing only the questions in a piece of writing, it’s online here!)
When we’re writing, why do we ask questions?
Sometimes they’re rhetorical, like the one I just asked now. They’re a literary signpost, a little trick for ushering the reader along: Great question, glad you asked, let me answer that one!
Other times the questions are truly … questions. They come from the moments where we’re genuinely humble, and have arrived at the limits of our knowledge. We’re just thinking out loud, and, ideally, trying to find a really good question, one that frames our ignorance in a productive fashion. Many thinkers — from Socrates to my personal fave literary scholar Northrop Frye — argued that the acme of intellectual life wasn’t in knowing stuff but devising the truly puzzling, awe-inspiring questions that echo in the mind for years.
Of course, sometimes questions are sort of fun — jokey ones, where everyone knows the answer (or thinks they do), so the writer is just making a bond with the audience.
And surely there are even more — far more — ways to use questions, right? (See what I did there? (And there?))
I’ve been watching how writers use questions lately, and thought: Hmmm, it’d be cool to see only the questions in a piece of prose.
I probably started down this line of thinking because last fall I created a little web tool that removes everything but the punctuation from a piece of writing. That tool wound up being a pretty intriguing type of literary x-ray: I discovered, for example, that I use a ton of parentheticals (and way too many m-dashes).
Since I already had the code for that, it wasn’t too hard for me to program a version focuses on questions instead.
So here it is — “Only The Questions”, hosted on Glitch …
