The One Big Question We All Work With in Fiction
Author Sara Foster investigates the one big question all authors work with in fiction and shares why it’s so important.
One of my favorite pieces of writing advice is from the author Brit Bennett, who says she always writes with a question in mind, not an answer. There are countless questions asked in fiction, but they almost always begin with the same two words: What if?
What if your spouse unexpectedly saw their first true love, while you were out to dinner?
What if the person you thought ran away from your relationship was in fact trying to protect you?
What if your partner hadn't told you about the most traumatic event of their life?
These are all questions from my novel Come Back to Me—but I’m sure that, should we take any novel and strip away the prose style, the characters, the themes, we'd be likely to find the same fundamental question starting every story.
What if?
This foundational question originates with the author, but it doesn't end there. It ignites the journey of each character and informs the plot that will slowly spread out before them. It also allows the author to play with what they are creating. The through-line—the central "what if" questions—will often remain the same, but within the story the author will tinker with a thousand smaller decisions. "What if this secondary character is actually more important than I first realized?" "What if I change the setting for the finale?" "What if I tell this story through multiple points of view?" Each question, and the answer that follows, takes the story along a different path, away from myriad others, as it's slowly molded towards its final form.
But not all what-ifs are the same. Some operate at the level of the world itself: What if magic were real? What if death could be reversed? What if society were organized entirely differently? These are the premises often found in science fiction and fantasy, and they tend to work by imposing a single, precise constraint and then following where it leads. Others operate by looking back at specific points in time—What if the war had ended differently? What if one letter had never been sent?—reminding us how contingent the present is, and how easily the world we know could have gone another way. And then there is the most personal kind of what-if, the one that turns on our psychological and moral choices: What if I had told the truth? What if I had stayed?
The most resonant fiction often layers all of these together, beginning with the expansive questions and closing in until it becomes intensely personal—or moving in the opposite direction entirely. In my own story, a contained question—"What if Julia reappears in Alex's life when he's married to Chloe?"—slowly opens into something much bigger: "Is it truly, ethically possible to be in love with two people at the same time?" This is where the reader can enjoy a story on multiple levels: following the specifics of the characters' journeys while pondering the larger questions that what-ifs are so often asking about human life, culture, morality and decision-making.
A canny author might also use an awareness of the reader's own what-ifs to generate excitement—leading the reader one way for a while, then taking the story somewhere unexpected. When this is done without structural awareness of the story's full shape, it can feel disconcerting, as though a rug has been pulled from under us. But when done by a master storyteller—think of the surprising twists in Lisa Jewell's novels, or the way Alex Michaelides dismantles everything you thought you knew in the closing pages of The Silent Patient—it's incredibly exciting. You realize the author has been holding the other questions back all along, waiting for exactly the right moment to release them.
What-ifs in novels give us a chance to peek into all the places we cannot go and the lives we cannot live—inducing intrigue, empathy, and a sense of heightened awareness as we traverse these unfamiliar terrains. But perhaps their greatest power is that they don't just ask questions about fictional characters. They ask questions about us. As we watch other lives play out on the page, making up our minds about each choice and circumstance, these questions offer a window into worlds we might otherwise judge without much thought—and in doing so, they quietly widen our understanding, our compassion, and our convictions.
Check out Sara Foster's Come Back to Me here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
