Long Questions/Short Answers Long Questions/Short Answers
Take some time this weekend – better yet, play hooky, take a snow day or a sick day – and just think about the question you’d be happy spending a decade or six trying to answer. It’ll light up your world more than any answer could.
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How to focus
“The piece is developing a compelling argument about how the right question can generate almost supernatural persistence .
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Questions attract, drive, and distinguish.
We talked a little bit about attracting . This is what happens to me when I’m writing a piece. Suddenly, I discover useful tidbits without even looking for them.
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One of the things it is to be a human being is to pursue a question so Big that you could pursue it for a Bryan Johnson Lifetime and never get your answer.
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This is what questions do: they pull the right stuff into your brain.
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But I think that for most of us there exists a question that could impact each of us similarly, and I know that most of us have not spent nearly enough time asking what that question is.
Let’s test that: what’s your question?
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“How can we live a meaningful, non-bullshitty life in a world increasingly full of irony, entertainment, and distraction?”
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DFW, writer
His novels, like Infinite Jest and The Pale King, are long (long) explorations of the question; his profiles, like David Lynch Keeps His Headto Roger Federer as a Religious Experience, examine rare individuals, whose strangeness and mastery, respectively, suggest an answer.
“The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said.”
The questions we ask reshape our reality.
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How can words capture the full depth, structure, and texture of reality?"
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers Long Questions/Short Answers
McPhee, writer
McPhee has published 34 books and written more than 100 articles for The New Yorker. That is the output of someone who is working on the craft itself. What’s more, McPhee has been teaching writing at Princeton University since 1975.