One time, I was negotiating with the heads of a commercial trade association. We were introducing a new safety standard for a product type. This group had not bothered to find out about it until late on but now wanted a piece of the action. They had brought with them a couple of powerful players to support their case. However, all the work had been done. What they were proposing was that we hold up the process for several months while in effect they went over old ground, purely so they could get their name attached to the project and thereby enhance their status for new would-be clients.

I pointed out that they were proposing work that wasn’t necessary and their leader said a strange thing: “I do not know that question.” Then he continued to outline their redundant work schedule, smiling all the time as if I hadn’t actually questioned him. I asked what was necessary about their proposal, and again he said, “I do not know that question.” This irritated me and I repeated my challenge. One of the group’s supporters then admonished me for being aggressive. Absurdly, perhaps, they had won their case: they’d been presenting themselves in a reasonable manner while I’d been contradictory and blunt. So the pointless work went ahead.

Now, picture a night out with a small group of friends. Drinks, laughs, reminiscing. Lots of unspoken agreement; little challenge. Warm feeling of same-ness, of shared beliefs. Yet a dispassionate observer might just detect an aura that amounts to, “I do not know that question.” Work being done that’s already been done. Which is not really conducive to insight or awareness or perception.

Friends mostly support each others’ ongoing self-deceptions: that they know everything; that their political views are not opinion but fact; that the war they’ve had going with their neighbours for years is a just one; that their jokes are actually funny.

Does it matter? Probably not for a nice night out. But the question is, what if you treat your characters the same way? You write them as not knowing the question that the story is going to ask of them. They just agree with each other and the closed doorness of their situation.

Can a writer switch from not knowing the question in his life to knowing it in his fiction? If you keep the door closed when you deal with your friends (and enemies), can you actually write a character who likes to keep it open?

Maybe this doesn’t matter if you’re writing plot-driven stories. In fact, it’s probably an advantage that your characters don’t question their situation, or refuse to take part in the plot because it’s predictable and already been done to death. But . . .

There was that last night of a writing course, in the hotel bar, everyone else gone to bed, just you and another writer you hadn’t spoken to before. You got talking, with no agenda. There was a tacit agreement between you that you’d probably never meet again or even stay in touch. At some point, she told you she was getting married soon and mostly felt excited by it, but it also meant entering a specifically ordered world full of nice people with implicit rules, of pleasantly decorated but nonetheless closed doors. She didn’t say but you understood her fear that it would affect her writing. And she’d become a writer in the first place in order to lift rocks to see what was underneath; to rifle through people’s diaries and use the contents mercilessly to explore the human condition.

You didn’t want anything from her, and she didn’t want anything from you, other than a couple of hours of talking openly and honestly. Secrets were shared, not of specific names, dates and places, but of the steadfast intention to simply tell the truth, first to oneself, then to everyone else.

Afterwards, you indeed went your separate ways and never discussed it again. Which is how it should be between a writer and a reader.

You never checked the books she published later. You hoped they’d be true, and that if they were, it hadn’t meant the loss of her family and friends. You didn’t want to find that they weren’t.