Journaling as a Private Playground: In Search of the Burning Question

By Olga Katsovskiy

At the recent Boston Book Festival, memoirist Kelly McMasters told her fellow writers that she simply does not believe in writer’s block, because the drive to write comes from a nagging question.

I love the sentiment as it mirrors much of what I have seen written on craft, the notion that a compelling essay revolves around a personal question, a shadow over the author’s life central to an internal conflict. In these essays, the resolution is not as important to the re...