One idea I really liked in Amy Whitaker’s book Art Thinking was a concept borrowed from Hollywood screenwriters—the “MDQ,” or Major Dramatic Question.
The MDQ is the engine that drives the plot of a narrative forward, broadening the stakes, extending the specific to the universal.
Whitaker suggests that people can have their own MDQs—which she calls “lighthouse questions.” These questions orient us, organize our efforts, provide a structure for our thinking.
Whitaker’s transposed screenwriting guideline reminds me of Richard Feynman’s 12 problems.
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
I’m not sure the expansive “lighthouse question” framework makes sense for me. (I’m not trying to run an under four-minute mile like Roger Bannister, Whitaker’s big anecdote.) But I appreciate that it called me back to Feynman’s structure.
I mentioned one of these questions I have the other day, inspired by Peter Berger:
Where do I live?
The question, in its broadness, resists a single answer.
The question takes several different lines of inquiry—geology, trees, weather, history—and sets them together to suggest a pattern.
What does that pattern look like? Where do I live?
Taylor Coe 