Writing tip 25 - pursue ignorance - ask questions

Does the most interesting writing ask questions, or provide solutions? Or...

Is the sky the limit?

Like this Tip section of the blog, it's possible that too much advice can be quite annoying.  Why? It might be because providing answers generally implies particular assumptions, and closes off other alternatives. It might be that it assumes an uneven distribution of expertise between the giver and receiver of advice.

So, sorry about that, and a caveat - I know nothing! Next to nothing. Moving on...

I listened to a couple of TED talks on science this week, and they both suggested that opening up, rather than closing off, was the way to go. Science is not so much about proving what you know, as discovering what you don't know. It's not so much the pursuit of information as the pursuit of ignorance. As I listened, I thought that the same could apply to storytelling.

The pursuit of ignorance could well be another way of growing intelligence. Check out the links. In this model, entropy is useful. Chaos is productive. Certainty might well be less  productive - at least if there is too much of it. It can slow down discovery and close off possible responses to difficulties.

Is this why advice is so stultifying - because it closes off possibilities and attempts to provide a single solution to a problem that we might have created precisely so that we can explore the possibilities? That's just one idea, and like all these 'tips', everything written here is simply an idea which may or may not be useful. It can be taken, or leaven (that is to say, inflated like bread!). From a pragmatic point of view the more we learn, the more we understand that we don't know. And I guess this is a good thing.

Maybe one of the reasons I like storytelling is because it presupposes that, even with the same characters, there are countless alternative stories possible - different choices and circumstances create different stories. Maybe the whole idea of fiction is about asking 'what if?' And 'what if' might be an even better question than 'why'.

The best question, if we want to really learn something, is an open question - one that does not lead to an absolute conclusion, a 'because', or a 'yes/no' type of answer. At its best, a good question - or a good story - opens up the space for even more interesting questions to be asked.

Feel free to comment and disagree.

Prompt: Read through what you have done and remove all solutions replacing them with questions.