Ask questions. Ask your friends and family questions. Always be prepared for the right moment to ask questions (in person, by email, by telephone, by text message, God forbid by snail mail). Why did the dog leap out the car window that time? How did Grampa actually kill himself? What was it like to make love to the boy of your dreams after you yearned for him all those months? You will regret not having asked friends and family questions after they’re gone (to another state or to the afterlife). You will never know what other people think unless you ask them to explain what they think and how and why they did what they did. Ask questions and then write down the answers later. Or write down the questions and let them germinate for a while. Remember, when you write in any kind of journal (or even in letters or emails), don’t pay attention to what you’re feeling. Pay attention to what you see, hear, and sense. Listen to the answers family and friends give for what they say about them, not for what they say about your relationship to them.

We learn about the world only by asking good questions. So I revise the first sentence above: Ask good questions. Ask questions that will open up the person you’re asking questions of. Ask intelligent questions that force your answerer to break up the responses into several categories. What do you write about? Why do you write about what you write about? Where does your fiction come from? Who are you and how does that matter to your fiction? How do you know anything about yourself? Ask yourself good questions—unsettle yourself with a probing inquest.

I had great teachers—Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Wayne Carver, Fred Tuten, and Mark Mirsky. Their approach to the workshop was to ask us to bring full drafts of stories to class without any guidelines or suggestions for how to write those full drafts. A few of them offered exercises. My first MFA teacher Mark Mirsky asked me questions about myself and my family, outside of class, and he guided me toward a different subject matter for my fiction than I was exploring at the time, and this was a very good thing. These simple questions he asked me when I was twenty-six were very important. I told him my father was a philosopher, my mother an opera singer, and my grandfather collected beetles. He laughed and said, “My God, why aren’t you writing about them?” At the time I was writing about my gay older brother’s discovery of his homosexual urges in his early teens, so I was offended. Mark was a born-again Jewish mystic, newly puritanical, and he publicly disapproved of the subject of homosexuality. It took me a few days to realize how right Mark’s question nevertheless was, even though I loved writing about my brother and I loved my brother. Why was I not writing about my whole family? Not everyone has to write about her family, but who you know are among your most important resources, and knowing these people means asking more questions than you are likely asking. People do love to be asked about themselves, about their history, their choices, their successes, and even their failures.

I was in the last fiction workshop Donald Barthelme taught at City College (in New York) in the spring of 1983. He began teaching full-time at Houston after that. In most fiction workshops, students hand out copies of stories a week or a class in advance, and both the students and the teacher have plenty of time to read through the stories. Barthelme did not allow this. He did not even want copies handed out the day of class, so that we could not read along on paper what was being spoken aloud to us. Some violated the rule and read copies surreptitiously handed out, samizdat fashion (Russian “newspapers” during the Soviet era copied by hand and passed secretly from person to person). Barthelme argued that we needed to learn how to hear stories and respond to them only that way (but he was also avoiding work outside of the three hours of class as much as he could). It was a great challenge, and a couple of students were never able to speak comfortably about something they’d heard just moments before (I found the system very difficult). A student would read the story aloud, and then Barthelme would ask tough questions of one student (never the writer). If that student did not answer the question to Don’s satisfaction, he asked a different question of another student. We were trained not to think of interesting and entertaining answers to his questions. These questions were generally related to narrative strategies, point of view, and language. He often pointed to the one or two places in the story on which the story seemed to rest, and he asked us if we thought this was fair or earned. I loved this stern Socratic method, even though I found it so difficult. It was like something out of law school. Don made things move along quickly, without the usual blather of a workshop. He did not want to hear from everyone about a story. The class was not democratic. He was satisfied when he’d heard enough interesting things, and this offended some of my classmates.

Donald Barthelme used these questions to instruct his students to be better readers—reading seemed as important as writing. Don’s fiction has always been a reader’s paradise, a field littered with fragments of advertising, philosophy, art, and other fiction. If you look closely, you’ll see his writing is filled with questions, too, a simple method of turning the story on a dime, changing the rhythm or speed. They are questions the reader might have asked himself if he’d thought of them.

In his later fiction Donald Barthelme drifted toward a binary (or dialectic) question and answer style that we first see in his story “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel.” In other stories he began to dispense with even markers like Q or A, and certainly with character names, to identify the speakers. In The King, Barthelme’s last novel, the bulk of the work of the story is done by means of dialogue between King Arthur and the usual suspects of the Round Table (although the story is set during the Second World War). These pieces of talk are attributed, but mostly they stand alone as pure thought uttered as spoken language, the way “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel” does.

Why Q and A? These stories read like theater. But they also remind me of Plato’s Dialogues (and dozens of other philosophical texts since Plato), some say proto-novels. Dialogue is simply a very efficient method of advancing story or understanding of reality, and the more I read of Barthelme the more I’m convinced his first goal with any fiction he wrote was to say and do it as succinctly as possible. In the nineteenth century, at the peak of the novel’s success, most novelists still felt terribly inferior to playwrights (in an era when theater was bad—the drama novelists looked to was mostly Shakespeare), and the great gains of the novel late in that century involved bringing theatrical set-pieces into the otherwise episodic and linear patterns of narrative. The great discovery of the novel was many voices in polyphony. Donald Barthelme could have been expressing that inferiority complex anew by turning so wholeheartedly to such theatrical formulas, but I think it is a more complicated expression and compression of his two great loves (in terms of reading), philosophy and the plays of Samuel Beckett, the first inspiration for his fiction. It is also good to remember that Waiting for Godot was a rough transcription of the conversations Beckett and his girlfriend had as they walked from Paris (where they were nearly caught by the Gestapo couriering information for the underground) to central France, where they hid out for the rest of the war.

The Q and A of “Kierkegaard…” is a lot like the conversation that goes on within one mind (Yeats said, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry”). Barthelme’s later stories play with true human conversation—inside the mind and also between humans. This is the method he seemed to have decided was most representative of his art. After the years of experimenting with a new method in nearly every story, he settled largely on this one method, and this is telling. Fiction is conversation; fiction is questions and (sometimes) answers.