professionally. The key to this exercise is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer. To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in. The power of your favorite problems is that they tend to stay fairly consistent over time.

Of all the questions an aspiring writer might ask herself, here’s the most urgent: What makes a reader keep reading? Or, actually: What makes my reader keep reading? (What is it that propels a reader through a swath of my prose?)

“I am investigating the Kennedy assassination.” “Are you an investigator now?” she asked with a broad smile. The last time we dined, my profession was a failed movie producer. “Not yet, but I am learning how.” “And how do you do that?” It was a question I had been wrestling with since I had begun my interviews. For my first interview, I prepared 10