The Essential Question and Central Message

Every piece of strong writing is trying to answer one real question. Not a question you already know the answer to before you start, the kind you could just look up, but a question you are still working out as you write. That question is called an essential question, and the answer you land on by the end is your central message. Writers rarely start with the tidy version. They start messy, follow the question through a draft, and only in revision do they figure out what they were actually trying to say.

This is why revision matters more than most students think it does. Revision is not proofreading. Checking commas and spelling is editing, and it happens last. Revision means re-seeing the piece: reading a draft and asking whether it actually answers your question yet, or whether it is still circling around something you have not named. A writer who revises well will cut a paragraph they liked because it does not serve the question, or add a section that finally says the thing the whole piece was reaching for. The central message often only becomes clear partway through, which is why a second draft usually says more than the first one, not just says it more cleanly.

David A. Robertson, a Swampy Cree author from Norway House Cree Nation, wrote the picture book When We Were Alone (Tundra Books, 2016) around a question that mattered to him personally: how do I put back the Cree words my father was forbidden from using in residential school? In a 2017 CBC Books interview, Robertson explained that he built the story around a grandmother answering her granddaughter's questions about why she does the things she does now, tracing each answer back to something taken from her as a child. Every choice in the book, the words he chose to include, the structure of question and answer, the ending, serves that one central question. Nothing in the finished book feels accidental, because Robertson kept revising against that question until the book said exactly what he needed it to say.

Your own essential question does not have to be about history or culture on a large scale. It can be as specific as something from your own life: a decision your family made, a place that shaped you, a story you were told or never told. What matters is that the question is real, meaning you do not already know the full answer, and that you are willing to let your draft change as you get closer to it.

Before you start reading, think about this: what is one question about your own life, family, or community that you have never fully worked out an answer to? And when you read Robertson's piece next, watch for the moment he names the exact thing his book is trying to do. What is his essential question, and how do you know?

Further Reading

David A. Robertson, "Why David A. Robertson Wanted When We Were Alone to Celebrate the Cree Language," CBC Books (2017): https://www.cbc.ca/books/why-david-a-robertson-wanted-when-we-were-alone-to-celebrate-the-cree-language-1.4397467

David A. Robertson, When We Were Alone (Tundra Books, 2016)