In the workshop, we talk a lot about the MDQ.

“What is the essay’s MDQ?” “Did the essay explore the MDQ?” “Does the essay even have an MDQ?”

But that MDQ can be tricksy to track down. It hides among the tangled thickets of your early versions. It lurks in the shadows of your prose. You may need to write many drafts before you can flush out an essay’s MDQ.

MDQ stands for “main dramatic question.” It’s a craft idea that my current cohort of the Essay Incubator has been generously tossing around the workshop over the past few months. As we wrap up the 2026-27 program, I’m reflecting on the importance of this concept, as a guidepost, as a beacon, to find our way through our essays.

Our cohort borrowed the concept of “MDQ” from the beloved writer Melissa Febos, who visited GrubStreet (virtually) in January to give a craft talk called “How Not to Be Boring.” In her estimation, every essay must have this ineffable (but still, somehow, effable) quality of purpose, drive, direction. An essay must be focused on a desire, or tension, or irritation, or journey, or transformation. In other words, around a question — the central question that your essay must endeavor to probe, understand and investigate.

For example, here are three stabs at identifying the MDQ for three of my essays in progress:

• Why am I still triggered by my father’s criticisms, 59 years after my birth?
• What does it mean to be an observer of nature and birds, and also a part of nature, and to be in conversation with birds, as a human?
• How does the Ethan character reconcile his love of bananas without becoming complicit in the destructive agricultural, environmental and political practices of the banana industrial complex?

The great critic Vivian Gornick refers to this as the “story.” But wait! All this stuff happened to me. Isn’t that my story?


No, Gornick admonishes. “Story” is not the surface level of events that occurred to you that you recall and throw down on the page. That, she would say, is the “situation”: mere context, circumstance, plot. The story is “the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say,” Gornick writes in The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. The story is what “the writer is able to make of what happened."

My friend and fellow Grub instructor and writer Dorian Fox calls this conflict, and it need not be “monumental.” All it needs to be is “an interesting one that the writer has a clear emotional or intellectual stake in,” Fox says. “I think we should feel the writer pushing toward some kind of answer, even if that answer can’t be known.”

This scrutiny of meaning is the same idea as what Febos calls the MDQ. And every essay must have one (or two, or three), around which the essay circles, “by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk,” writes Phillip Lopate, “each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter.”

How to do that, and in what final form or voice, is up to you.

An MDQ need not be directly or explicitly stated in any essay, but it must be visible. The essay must feel like a satisfactory inquiry into that MDQ by the time we reach the final paragraph. Knowing the magnetic core of your MDQ will help you, in later drafts, decide what belongs in this essay, and what can be cut (or saved for another essay).

So how do you arrive at the MDQ? Through the deliberate practice of interrogating that question after each draft of your essay. Through the process of revision. Through getting feedback, such as in a workshop, or the Essay Incubator program. 

Ethan Gilsdorf teaches the Essay Incubator, GrubStreet’s intensive, 10-month program which meets Monday evenings in Boston, September 2026—June 2027 for weekly workshops, craft discussions, and visits from writers and editors. The deadline to apply for the 2026-27 cohort is June 30. Read more about the program and application process here.