Why Do We Ask Questions? And What Does It Mean When We Stop?

"Children are the research & development division of the human species"--Patt Olivieri

Paquita. A girl at the orphanage
where we were in Mexico, 1981.

It's been a while since my children were little, but now that I'm a grandfather to a couple youngsters under five I'm remembering how sparkling and alive their developing minds were. What an amazing experience to be young explorers with no preconceived notions about this colorful, magical world we're born into and their endless inquisitiveness.

inquisitive: adj. -- curious or inquiring

Some of the synonyms for inquisitive have negative implications. Nosy, snooping, meddlesome and prying, for example, imply that inquisitive people don't respect boundaries.

And it's true. When we're young, we have no way of understanding a concept like boundaries until we're actually told, or scolded, for violating one of the unwritten rules of social engagement.

On the other hand, who doesn't love the innocence of a young inquiring mind? 

As I thought about these things I pondered as to why older people eventually stop asking questions. My first thought in that regard possibly has to do with our penchant for already having answers to everything. What I mean here is that after youngsters head off to school, it seems like the next many years are focused on answering questions, not asking them. Quizzes, tests and the like get graded based on our answers. How often are we rewarded for good questions? (OK, there are definitely teachers who enjoy seeing those young minds engaged and inquisitive.)

Peer pressure can also cause us to clam up for fear of coming across as stupid or ignorant. Asking a question that everyone already knows the answer to makes us feel stupid. It's embarrassing.

When I was in sixth grade my family moved to New Jersey. As the newby I was made to feel embarrassed and made to feel stupid more than a few times. On one occasion a classmate came up to me and said that there was a rumor going around that I was pregnant and they wanted to know if it were true. I had no idea what the word pregnant meant. Nevertheless I felt obligated to give a reply, so I said yes.

I immediately snuck off to the library to find a dictionary.  As I remember it, the dictionary was about six inches thick, lying open atop a pedestal and though I could read the words I wasn't fully grasping them.

Fear of humiliation may be one reason we stifle our questions in public. I've certain seen it in the workplace where co-workers may use acronyms in a manner that suggests they are common knowledge. If you stop the meeting to ask what AML means, will you be glared at for being so dense? So you bite your tongue. The problem is, others may have the same question so that there has actually been no communication taking place because the meaning was lost.

Which brings me back to the beautiful innocence we find in the uninhibited inquiries of children. Here are a few questions my son asked when he was little.

Where did all the dinosaurs go?
Do dinosaurs eat worms?
Where are all the astronauts? 
Why don't we see them walking on the streets?
Do ants have fire trucks? (no.) What do they do when their houses catch on fire?      (EdNote: See my poem The Ants: A Tale)

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A week or two ago I came across a story on Medium by Adelina Vasile about her three-year-old son. It was titled Smile-Stealing Small Talk With a Little Boy. Medium as a blogging platform brings writers and readers together from all over the world. I find it a rather amazing time in history when ordinary people can write stories that people all over the world can read and respond to. 

Next I noticed that Adelina was from Romania, a country many Americans probably don't know that much about. I remember becoming aware of that nation during the 1976 Olympics when gymnast Nadia Comaneci won a gold medal and became the first gymnast to score a perfect 10. In 2010, the memory of that event triggered a blog post titled Nine Things You Maybe Didn't Know About Romania.

It was against this backdrop that I decided to reach out and learn what kinds of questions a Romanian boy might ask. As it turns out, Ms. Vasile was open to going along with it. The next thing I knew, I had the following list of questions in my inbox. Her son's name is Matthew, so I will title this list of questions Matthew's World. It's interesting how wildly imaginative children's minds are all over the world.

Matthew's World

Matthew searching for answers inside
a toy he took apart.

What are microbes?

Why can’t we see microbes?
If I look through a “miboscobe” will I see microbes?

Did the dinosaurs purr? (Like cats…)
What dinosaurs lived on our street when that big rock fell from the sky?
What do you mean our street didn’t exist when the dinosaurs died?
Not even our house?
Not even our neighbors?

Will a crocodile eat us if we meet with him?
Will a tiger eat us?
The tiger is a bigger cat?
Will a penguin eat us?
Why do penguins eat fish?

What is an Eskimos?
Do Eskimos live at the North Pole?
What is the Arctic region?
Are there any Eskimos at the South Pole?
When will we go to the North Pole?

When I’ll grow up I will be allowed to drink wine?
Will the police let me drive too?
What if the police will catch me flying at high speed? (he was talking about flying a plane)
If you’re in a helicopter without a seatbelt, will the police give you a fine? 

Is it true that monsters don’t exist?
What is an ogre?
If ghosts were real, what would they look like?
How does a baby ghost look like?

How did grandpa die?
When will grandpa be alive again?
What is grandpa doing now? (the deceased grandpa)
When will we die?
Can I eat this until I die? (strawberry jam)
Will you cry if I die?

Daddy, what did you see interesting at work today?
How did you sleep last night?
What did you buy me?
Is there any surprise for me in this package?

What are the eyes that we see through?
What is inside my belly?
What happens if my penis breaks?
What happens if I lose all my blood?
Will I grow big muscles if I eat these 3 chickpeas?
Can I have 8 plums? Are 8 plums a lot?

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The headline for this blog post promises to answer the question "What does it mean when we stop asking questions?" When I asked Quora, I found some pretty thoughtful replies. You can find those answers here.

Thanks for dropping by. And if you have young ones, what kinds of questions are they asking? Would you share them in the comments?

Related Links

When Kids Smack You in the Head With Some Philosophical Idea

Follow Adelina on Medium

Are You Protopian, Utopian or Dystopian?

How Effective Is A Personal Website for Short Stories?

What follows is my answer to a question I was asked on Quora, the international crowdsourcing Q&A website. In 2018 I got the nod as a top writer on Quora, a website I enjoyed because I could help people by answering their questions, from silly to curious, earnest and serious, and everything in between. In 2019 I dropped off from being so active on Quora because I'd amped my participation on Medium, a platform that pays its writers whose work is being read and appreciated.

Q: How effective is a personal website for short stories?

Effective in what way?

When the internet was first emerging I created a website and shared poetry, art, journalism and short stories…. among other things. There were not a lot of websites in 1995–96 and I even got a badge from the St Paul Pioneer Press as a Top 5 Minnesota Websites of the Week.

One day I got contacted by a poetry website in Croatia. They asked permission to translate my story Duel of the Poets into Croatian as a centerpiece. (The story now appears in my book Unremembered Histories.)  A few months later a Russian website contacted me to translate another one of my stories into Russian.

Later, a French grad student was given the assignment to translate a story by an American writer into French and he selected my story Terrorists Preying. This was especially interesting because the word Preying is a Homonym for Praying and he had trouble trying to convey that in his translation.

Still later, I was contacted by a pair of young filmmakers for permission to make my story Episode on South Street into a short movie. I said I was honored and within the year it was on Vimeo.

I never made a penny, but felt honored and gratified that my work was appealing to readers. So I go back to the question “How effective in what way?” Keep in mind that the whole world is uploading content at dizzying speeds and your little batch of stories may never be seen at all if you don’t also find ways to let people know they are there. According to this website “There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating.”

In early 2011 I received some encouragement from someone I respected that my stories were worth sharing more widely and by the end of the year I published Unremembered Histories and two volumes for Kindle which, if I could do over again I would have done differently.

I think a website is useful for having all your work in one place. The downside is that most publications consider your work “published” if you do this, and you will have trouble selling it later.

I did it in order to share my work with readers. I disliked the whole game of sending things to publishers and waiting for rejection slips. But if you do decide to put your stories online, you can also repurpose them and share them on. Medium, which is a community fo writers.

As a  final aside I'll mention here that also used the website to share a few stories my children wrote. We were homeschooling for a while and in 2000 or 2001 I shared a long cowboy story my son had written and two of my daughter's stories. As it turns out, one of my daughter's stories was published in a California periodical and another in a New Zealand publication. No money in either, but it did make me a proud papa.

I hope this has been helpful.

A Medium-Sized Update on Medium

Medium Update

Photo courtesy John Heino Photography

Earlier this summer I began blogging on a platform called Medium. Medium was founded by Ev Williams, the same geek/entrepreneur who created Blogger and later co-founded Twitter. As a writer I have found both of Williams' creations exceedingly valuable, so it seemed only natural to explore what he was trying to achieve with the third iteration of social engagement. Since I learn best by doing, I have been going through my Ennyman's Territory blog posts (near every day since Spring 2007) and building an archive of the "evergreen content." (Evergreen as in "not seasonal." Much of my blog content features events and happenings that are here today and gone tomorrow... or important for the season.) In other words, I have been taking an inventory of my 4000 blog posts to determine what has enough value to be recycled and what should be left on the vine. 

It's been an eye opening experience, and I will share more of what I've learned about blogging in a separate post. 

Right now I am trying to learn what I can about Medium. This Hubspot blog post offers a Beginners Guide, but it's two years out-of-date so that some features have changed, because like the Internet itself, things keep getting upgraded, revised for the purpose of improving the "user experience."

For what it's worth, I am liking many features that Medium offers. The platform has been clearly designed to make it easy for writers to create elegant pages. One of my favorite features is that you can re-post (import) other things you have created online by pasting the URL into a box and hitting a button. Boom! Your whole article with images is right there. You may need to edit a couple things or make adjustments on photo placement, but dagnabbit that's a really nice feature. 

More importantly, though, for all you SEO buffs... Medium automatically writes code into your blog post that tells Google where the origin of this article or story came from. Google accepts this and does not penalize you for duplicate content. (As someone familiar with the ways of Google Search and SEO, this was a huge HUGE relief... 

I Still Have Questions

The whole point of writing and sharing your work is to have it read. I haven't yet found the best path to find readers yet on Medium. Currently I average more readers in a day (1000) here at Ennyman's Territory than I do in a month on Medium. Granted, I only just started there in June, and that first month I did better by three-fold than my first month here in 2007. By way of contrast I am averaging 5000 readers a week on Quora. I never did any promotion of the Quora writings. I simply found it an intriguing diversion at first, and kept answering questions trying to help people, occasionally linking to blog posts here when the post addressed issues people were inquiring about. 

SO, BOTTOM LINE, if you participate in Medium and have had success finding readers, I'd be interested in connecting with you. Send me a note via my ennyman3 Gmail account or Message me on Twitter @ennyman3.

FWIW DEPT.
Some of my Medium results:

MY BEST ARTICLES so far (Number of Readers)
Why Print Still Matters For Marketers
Future Hype: The Myths of Technological Change
Five Significant Qualities Shared By Balzac, Picasso and Dylan

My FAVORITE ARTICLES So Far (Non-Fiction)
Ten Art Quotes That Will Surprise You
What Is A Writer?
Why Print Still Matters for Marketers
11 Sterling Quotes Reflecting the Wit & Wisdom of Mark Twain

Though my fiction has significantly fewer readers, here are my three best performers:

MY BEST STORIES So Far (Fiction)
Two Acts That Changed the World
Duel of the Poets
The Gladiator


I LEARNED SOMETHING NEW ABOUT MEDIUM THIS WEEK

Medium has an unusual method of rewarding its writers (who pay $5 a month for the privilege of earning income for their words.) You earn revenue based on readers showing their appreciation by clapping. WHAT I DIDN'T KNOW is that you can actually Clap UP TO 50 TIMES if you really like a story.

Thank you to all those who have given encouragement through the years. It means a lot and is part of what keeps me going. My aim, always, is to provide something of value for those who return from time to time. You are much appreciated.

Related Links
The Medium Model in Ev's Own Words
12 Types of Writers on Medium

Meantime, life goes on all around us. Get into it.

The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got and Other Writing Tips

At some point in the past three years I discovered, or was discovered by, Quora. Quara is a question and answer site in which questions are asked and answered by members of a community. It's like Siri and Google in the sense that people ask questions, but it is like a massive international forum in that humans answer the questions and, like Reddit or other forums, humans upvote or downvote answers, and occasionally comment on them.

People who answer questions will then get asked more questions on that same theme, be it philosophy, religion, The Beatles or raising kids. I get asked a lot of questions about Dylan, blogging and writing. Here is one question that I was asked at the beginning of this year.

What was the most helpful, or most memorable writing advice book you've ever read?

The most memorable advice I ever got came from Sherwood Wirt’s book, You Can Tell The World. There were many useful insights in the book. When he died in 2009 I wrote a tribute to him on my blog titled Sherwood Wirt, R.I.P.

HERE is an excerpt, which I considered the most valuable in my writing career:

If we're to produce great work, we must know what great work looks like. The only way is to be a reader of great works.

“Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marx’ and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Kierkegaard’s attacks on Hegel, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’ The Plague and others.

“These books, the most influential of our time, deal primarily with the scientific challenge and loss of meaning in a mechanistic society. There has been no Christian work written since the novels of Dostoevsky that can honestly be said to match them in boldness, in documentation, in breadth and scope, in vision, in appeal to the human spirit, or in grasp of truth. C.S. Lewis is the only Christian entry in the field. The opportunities are wide open, and there is plenty of room at the top.”

EdNote: I have read dozens of books about writing over the past half century and there are useful pearls in most of them. So, my advice to you then is to gather them and save them so you can review them and share them.

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Since retiring in December, I have begun to find a renewed interest in writing fiction. I don't know how far I will run with it, but the pump has been primed, there's water flowing and I'm feeling nourished, refreshed, invigorated.

When I built my first website in the mid-90's one of my aims was to share my short stories. Three stories were translated into foreign languages, and one translated to film. The downside of all that is that when later I sought to publish these stories in literary magazines, I learned that "no previously published stories" included being published online. Alas.

If you're a writer of fiction, one of the best teachers of writing (in my opinion) is the late John Gardner. I strongly recommend The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist. Here are a few quotes from these two books, followed by a couple final words of advice for writers.

On Writing Fiction: Insights from John Gardner

"Papa"

"Though the literary dabbler may write a fine story now and then, the true writer is one for whom technique has become, as for the pianist, second nature."
The Art of Fiction


"... whatever the genre may be, fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader's mind."
The Art of Fiction


"Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations."
The Art of Fiction


"What the young writer needs to develop, to achieve his goal of becoming a great artist, is not a set of aesthetic laws, but artistic mastery."
The Art of Fiction


"It may feel more classy to imitate James Joyce... than All In the Family; but every literary imitation lacks something we expect of good writing: the writer seeing with his own eyes."
On Becoming a Novelist

"Detail is the lifeblood of fiction."
On Becoming a Novelist


"The study of writing, like the study of classical piano, is not practical but aristocratic. If one is born rich, one can easily afford to be an artist; if not, one has to afford one's art by sacrifice."
On Becoming a Novelist


* * * *

"The main purpose of art... is this, that it tell the truth about the soul, revealing and giving expression to all the secrets one cannot say in simple words. ...Art is a microscope that the artist focuses on the secrets of his own soul, and that then reveals to men the secrets common to them all."
Tolstoy - diary note


"The real rewards of writing are serious and bitter as well as sweet. And they are private, not public."
William Sloan, The Craft of Writing

"One great inhibition and obstacle to me was the thought: Will it make money? But you find if you are thinking of that all the time, either you don't make money because the work is so empty, dry, calculated and without life in it. Or you do make money and you are ashamed of your work. Your published writing gives you the pip."
Brenda Uelland - If You Want to Write

* * * *

If you feel called to be a writer.... "Don't give up the fight."

A Rewarding Visit with Influential Writer/Entrepreneur Charles Chu, Including 4 Tips for Bloggers

I discovered the blog of Charles Chu by coming across an article he wrote about mental resilience and the techniques Navy SEALs use to develop it. The article struck me as not only useful, but engaging enough to make me want to explore more about the author. Its home was a blog with the intriguing title Market Meditations.  

EN: Where did you grow up and how has your family influenced who you are?

Charles Chu: I was born in the United States to Chinese immigrant parents. My parents were extremely poor and came to the US in search of a better life. It's the classic immigrant story. I grew up with a Chinese cultural environment at home but a very American one everywhere else. There was always a sense of not belonging and not fitting in. That made me ask a lot of questions about human nature, how the world works, etc.

EN: How long have you been writing your Market Meditations blog? What was its original purpose and how has it evolved?

CC: Funny story. The original blog was meant to be about finance, particularly global macro trading. That's why the word "Market" is in the title. That was one of the dozens of failed experiments I've had.

The real blog (as you know it) has only been around for two months. I was answering questions on Quora, and I was surprised to find that over one million people read my answers in a single month! That was the proof I needed that people like the way I think. I take a different approach to challenges (both philosophically and technically), and that reflects in the success the blog is seeing.

EN: Where did your belief that "success can be engineered" originate?

CC: Few people know this, but I come from a mathematical background. I used to do math competitions in grade school. I've also dabbled in poker and equity trading. If you look at successful performers in this field (or any field), they share common philosophies and attributes. And when you study the failures, they tend to lack these same qualities.

Success in investing or gambling is typically attributed to "luck", but the best know that it is engineered. You can create conditions to maximize the probability of profit (or success, in our case). Afterwards, all that is left is to survive long enough for results to start coming in.

EN: Who are some of the great thinkers whose ideas you deconstruct and share?

CC: Anyone who inspires me. The blog hasn't been around that long, but I've looked at statesmen (like Ben Franklin), writers (like Isaac Asimov), marketers (like Seth Godin), and even Hedge Fund managers (like Stanley Druckenmiller).

EN: What was your method for generating blog traffic?

CC: I can't cover this in detail without several dozen pages, but let me outline the general concepts.

• I borrow traffic. I write 90%+ of my stuff off the blog. Why? Because posting things on a blog shows it to nobody (except for your existing readership). You have to find places where people gather, show your work to them and give them a way to come to your site.

• I don't use SEO. For new bloggers, SEO is like picking pennies in front of a steamroller. You can do hours and hours of research to target keywords that bring 100-200 readers a month. I could spend that time engineering a hit on Reddit, Quora or another social sharing site and bring in 10-20 thousand readers instead.

• I find the right audience for my work. If I write something about minimalism or frugality, I'm not going to promote it to an advertising channel. It's not my right audience. I write about what interests me. This tends to fall into several core categories. The rest is just about finding where those people gather and showing them your work.

• I don't network. One of my posts was recently featured on the NY Observer. The editor emailed ME to ask to republish it. All I have to do is focus on putting my work out in public and making it top 1% in quality. Why spend hours pitching editors and other bloggers with mediocre writing when I can put that time into making amazing writing that other people beg me to share?

EN: Excellent advice. What are your favorite topics to write about?

CC: I scratch my own itch. I have a long laundry list of exciting ideas, but here are some—entrepreneurship, human nature, cognitive science, philosophy, biohacking, movement, productivity, world travel, risk-taking, guerrilla marketing, learning languages... I could go on forever.

My advice to other writers: if you want interest, you need to be interesting. And if you want to be interesting, be interested first. There are millions of other wannabe writers out there. What makes you the best in the world at what you do?

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Want more? Join 5000+ readers of The Open Circle, a free weekly newsletter where Charles deconstructs great minds and shares actionable insights from his own crazy experiments. 

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A lot of good suggestions here. Don't just read it. Ingest it and make it your own.