If you have been having difficulty finding topics or ways into the areas that you most want to explore in your writing, try the following exercise I developed from reading Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet to refresh your approach to writing personal essays. You may want to send your results in as entries to our current Writing It Real contest. If you do, I’ll get back to you with ideas for how to continue developing the essay for the contest’s guest judge.

The real topic of any piece of writing, the part that provides the emotional growth for both the writer and the reader, the part that holds everyone’s attention and lingers with them after reading, is the part that portrays the author’s search for an answer to some persistent question. It may be a question that is an obsession of the writer’s such as, “How will I live now that what I believed as a child seems wrong?” and it can occur for years after the precipitating event. The question might be, “If I don’t feel like a good parent, can I be any good at all?” or “Why do elephants always make me laugh?” It might be “If the city I live in is so polluted and crowded and violent, how come I haven’t given up on it?” or “Will I ever believe that I am a master?” or “What is my calling?”

The poet Rilke addressed the need for questions in an author in his famous Letters to a Young Poet:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Here is a writing practice to help you learn how living the questions facilitates writing: 

Fill a piece of paper with questions. Write any question that comes to you. Allow yourself to mix silly questions with esoteric ones, mundane questions with ethereal questions, questions that might have a simple answer with questions that undoubtedly have complex answers. This mix will free your unconscious to suggest questions that are important to your being.

What evidence do I have of life after death?

Which do I like better, granola or Rice Chex?

Will the rain wash away the smell of too many dogs using the yard?

What is the hardest thing for a woman to talk about?

What is the hardest thing for me to see about my life?

What is the hardest thing for me to see about myself?

What is the hardest thing for me to see about others?

How do I know these are the hardest for me to see?

Or try another way to get yourself to write questions by writing a dialog between two or more people in which no one is allowed to say anything that is not a question. Since you don’t have to claim the questions as your own, but allow your characters to ask them, you may have an easier time coming up with unexpected ones.  Let the people interact as if they were on stage or on a street corner or around a table conversing in this “question” way:

Harry: Are you coming to dinner with us?

Pauline: Am I feeling okay about wearing mink?

Harry: Why does fur make you comfortable?

Pauline: Why do I eat when I am not hungry?

Harry: Why do I always choose Hungarian food when I am feeling blue?

Pauline: When does paprika look like bursts from a blood vessel?

Harry: Will the act of chewing awaken my feeling of connection to something larger?

Pauline: When are good friends the most important part of living?

Put your writing away for at least a few hours or overnight. When you pick it up again, peruse it for a question that interests you. Draw a balloon on a piece of paper and print that question inside of it; draw a string on the balloon. Just like when you were a kid and you let helium-filled balloons go once you were inside your house knowing they would reach the ceiling and stay inside, imagine your question balloon floating aloft yet remaining in your eyesight. Let this question balloon keep you company like those magical balloons of our childhood.

Over a few days or a week, write down the specifics of where you are and what is happening when you remember the question you “left hanging in the balloon.” Describe where you are, what you see and what you feel, taste, touch and smell in the moment the question occurs to you, whether that is on city streets, a hiking trail, caring for grandchildren or standing by the stove where you are cooking oatmeal. Write about what you are thinking and doing when the question flashes in your mind and you see, taste, touch, hear and smell the world in which your question lives.

You might be groping in the dark for a light switch when you think about your question, and you can write about that–the feel of the carpet beneath your feet, the sound of the switch going on, the way the furniture looks as soon as the bright light comes.

Collect many such moments on the page. And after you have collected them, set about writing a longer piece from the notes you have kept. You might entitle it, “A Question” and repeat the question like a refrain, followed by sketch after sketch of the moments your question attracted to you.

The momentum built by the list of moments that come in answer to the same question will lead you, if you stay with the details, to new insight and to a satisfying ending to your piece of writing.

Even if this feels clumsy and disjointed as a way of writing, force yourself to give it a try. Questions are where the breath and spirit are.

If you allow yourself to write without worrying, my bet is that you will create highly lyrical pieces with great power and beauty that cohere because of the question-refrain you choose and the images that come from the moments in your life when you consider your question.