How to Use Questions to Drive Your Memoir’s Narrative

This article was written by one of the dozen independent journalists who received scholarships to the 2026 ASJA conference. 

By Mika Travis

Every memoir is powered by a question—even if the writer doesn’t know it yet. At the 2026 ASJA virtual conference, radio journalist and memoirist Kat Chow explained how “driving questions” both anchor and propel a story. 

Replays of conference sessions on memoir, journalism, nonfiction books, and content writing, plus keynotes and other events, are available on the Airmeet platform for $149 through May 30.  Conference attendees have free access to all conference replays through the same date. Get more information and buy the replays here. 

What are Driving Questions?

Chow is a co-founder of NPR’s Code Switch podcast. She is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University and has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, New York Magazine’s The Cut, and Radio Lab, among others. Her 2021 memoir “Seeing Ghosts” explores grief, family, and the immigrant experience.

Radio journalists often use driving questions to structure their stories, Chow said during her conference talk. But the technique translates seamlessly to memoirs and other narratives.

Driving questions are central questions that propel a narrative forward, which may or may not be explicitly stated within the story itself. Chow compared a driving question to a story’s engine, emphasizing that every part of the story should either work towards answering or complicating that question.

A story can have multiple driving questions that work to guide both the narrative as a whole and individual scenes. For instance, the driving questions of “The Great Gatsby” include “What is the American Dream?” and “Who is Jay Gatsby?”

Elements of an effective driving question include:

• Scope. A driving question can be complex or as simple as “What happened?”
• Why and how. These angles can provide a framework for the driving question.
• Answerability. Even if a question is complicated, the story has to be able to reach toward an answer.

Driving Questions in ‘Seeing Ghosts’

Chow’s memoir, “Seeing Ghosts,” examines how loss became the main lens through which she saw the world after her mother died at a young age. At the memoir’s core was the question, “What do we owe?”

Chow organized her story around this driving question, writing the big scenes that mattered most first and tightening it by cutting anything that wasn’t in service of the question. 

She explores this question through various avenues, including money and class (the money her father owed or that people owed him), filial piety (what do we owe our parents?), and her personal identity (what does she owe herself as a young woman?). 

She also uses recurring themes—taxidermy and ghosts—to reinforce her driving question.

Finding an Agent for Your Memoir

In the session, Chow advised memoirists to find an agent who can advocate on their behalf before speaking with book editors and publishers. She recommends that writers start paying attention to the imprints that publish the books they love, and to look in the acknowledgments sections of those books to see who the author’s agent was.

She also recommended Publishers Marketplace as a resource for finding agents who sell books to specific publishing houses.

Memoir Writing Prompts

Chow shared a writing prompt to help writers generate ideas for their own nonfiction work. The “Lyric Constellations” essay generative prompt was inspired by poet and writer Chet’la Sebree: 

1. What are five things that you’ve been unable to get out of your head? Things that you keep coming back to? Succinctly write a word for each of those five things — we’ll call them “stars” — on an empty page. Make sure each star has space around it. 
2. At each star, write three things they bring up. Maybe one star is “home,” and three things that “home” invokes are “the front door,” “leaving,” and “safety.”
3. Write a sentence or two about each of the three things.
4. Make points of connection. Are any of the phrases, words, themes, or stars related?

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Mika Travis is a freelance journalist and incoming master’s student in investigative journalism at Columbia University. She graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2024 with a bachelor’s in journalism and creative writing. Her work has been published in the Detroit Free Press, E&E News by Politico, and The Charlotte Ledger. Connect with her on LinkedInor visit her website.