Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
Creativity Prompt #8 Piaget’s Daughter | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
Pigeons in white and blue (1928) pattern in high resolution. Original from the Rijksmuseum.
Week Two! We’ve already finished seven days of the 30-Day Creativity Challenge! If you have not joined us yet and want to, you can absolutely access the numbered prompts in the archive and work at your own pace. You are never too late.
Meanwhile, to launch week two, we begin with questions. If you’ve never pondered the power of the question as an integral tool in writing, consider this passage written by the daughter of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget:
Where does that little baby come from? I don’t know. Out of the wood. Are you dust before you are born? Are you nothing at all? Are you air? Babies don’t make themselves, they are air. Eggshells make themselves in hens. I think they are air too. Pipes, trees, eggshells, clouds. The door. They don’t make themselves. They have to be made. I think trees make themselves and suns too. In the sky they can easily make themselves. How is the sky made? I think they cut it out. It’s been painted.
If you’re intrigued by the power of the questions asked by Piaget’s daughter, consider this fabulous tool made by Clive Thompson, which isolates the questions in any piece of writing. Below is what Thompson’s tool came with for the first chapter of Moby Dick:
The very word “question” implies a quest, writes Paul Matthews in Sing Me the Creation. He goes on to say:
Without a question we are forever shut out from the inner life of one another. In coming to the question we leave the firm ground of the statement behind and trust ourselves to the in-betweens, for the question is nothing if not open and receptive. This is the ideal it strives for.
In this sense, the question must be, perhaps by far, the most creative of the four sentence types.
This week’s structured exercise plays with the concept of the question. Not only will you be guided to “live into the questions,” as Rilke suggests we do, but also to construct and use specific questions as portals to your most elusive material—the stories, essays, and poems that shy from you and hide in shadowed corners.