Beyond Questions
Six prompt forms that are not questions, each eliciting by a different mechanism. Questions are one instrument; a host who only asks starts to sound like an interview.
The six forms
| Form | What it is | How it elicits | Working line | Lives in |
|---|
When a question is the wrong tool
Question fatigue. Three or more questions in a row reads as interview to the guest and as interrogation to a table; a statement or an imperative breaks the meter without losing direction.
The guarded guest. Scripts attach to questions — a rehearsed answer is waiting for the question that triggers it. Objects, samples, and statements arrive off-script: there is no prepared response to a photograph, and a wrong theory gets corrected in unrehearsed words. The non-adversarial forms pair with these.
The reluctant narrator. A guest who answers questions minimally will often annotate an object or beat a sample at length — the form carries the permission the question could not.
The question-shaped instruments live in Questions; objects and tasks to bring are in Explorations.