What about writers like j d Salinger or Bret Easton Ellis? In their stories, the dramatic question is usually “who are these people?” They rely on creating a complex character or characters and sometimes just show them in action for a certain number of pages, resolving very little by the end. Maybe you understand a little better what drives them or how they became that way, but they remain fundamentally mysterious at the end (usually). Is that still a dramatic question?
“Every story needs a dramatic question to answer”
What about writers like j d Salinger or Bret Easton Ellis? In their stories, the dramatic question is usually “who are these people?” They rely on creating a complex character or characters and sometimes just show them in action for a certain number of pages, resolving very little by the end. Maybe you understand a little better what drives them or how they became that way, but they remain fundamentally mysterious at the end (usually). Is that still a dramatic question?
See also, olegs cool stories: https://open.substack.com/pub/fictitious/p/the-divider