Intentionality in Storytelling

The other day, I was mounting a curtain rod.  When I went to tighten the screws that hold the rod in place on the brackets, I realized something: the screws were positioned in such a way with respect to the wall that I couldn’t fit the screwdriver into place.  I don’t know what the normal response to this might be, but my first thought was “what kind of engineer designed this?”  Then, I settled for making the screws finger-tight and moved on with my day.

The surface level analysis says that this incident was the result of inadequate attention to detail.  The designer placed the screw and hole without accounting for how the bracket would interact with its environment, and thereby missed out on considering the implication of that little detail called the wall.  While that’s true, I read something different in it: a lack of intentionality.  It’s not that the engineer didn’t account for the detail, but that the engineer wasn’t intentional in where to place the screw.  Two sides of a coin, perhaps, but where one is about thinking about a thing and missing something, the latter is more about not thinking about the thing at all.

Where attention to detail is about noticing things, intentionality is about thinking and being deliberate, and it has a relevance and impact far beyond where to place the hole for a screw on a curtain rod bracket.  It has a role to play any time a decision is involved, meaning that there is space for intentionality whenever we make a choice, and we make thousands of choices every day, major and minor.  A lot of the minor ones we make without putting in much thought – without being intentional about them.  That’s inevitable, and, as the software programmers for our brains might say, it’s a feature, not a bug.  You wouldn’t want to be intentional about every choice you have to make.  It would be overwhelming, impractical, unproductive, and, frankly, probably lead to worse decision-making as often as not, since being intentional does not mean you will necessarily make better decisions.  You’ll just have thought out your bad decisions more before you make them.  Discerning when and where to be intentional is the real trick, and it’s a skill to be exercised in both life and writing.

Instead of the world of engineering, and the temptation to again talk about designing optimized toilet based on parabolas and fluid dynamics, I want you to go back to your English class days.  Your English teacher probably had some book, at least one, on which he or she would expound endlessly.  You were forced to consider the meaning of the color of the curtains, the allusion implicit in the pattern on the upholstery, the significance of the tiniest scene.  At the time I was subjected to these painful exercises, I was in the early days of my interest in writing, but I would nonetheless assert on the basis of my (minimal) experience that sometimes, authors just put in details to put in details, and choose words so that there are words on the page.  Not everything is meant to carry some deeper meaning.  If the author paints the door to the nobleman’s manor in vibrant shades of yellow and green, it might not mean anything more than that they have bad taste.

And yet.  And yet.  Painfully and reluctantly, I’ve been forced to temper my position.  When writing poetry, the poet really does labor and ponder over every word, every comma and semicolon, every allusion, metaphor, and adjective.  With only a handful of lines, and a few words in each line, each one of them must bear a larger load for the poem, which means there’s no words to waste on indulgences like garish set dressings on a whim.  Everything must be intentional.  Correspondingly, poems are read in conversation with poets’ predilections – that is, with an assumption of intentionality.

Short stories, even flash fiction, don’t have quite the constraints of poetic forms, but they still demand intentionality from the author.  If you’re trying to tell a story in a mere two hundred words, that doesn’t leave spare words to spend on including descriptions of the weather just to add a little detail and texture, or to bring in minor characters who don’t contribute to the plot.  When you’re setting the scene in flash fiction, it better be in a way that makes the scene serve the story, not merely as a way to better immerse the reader.

If you read my stories and posts, you know I don’t really do flash fiction.  I certainly admire those who do, but my shortest stories are in the 1500-to-2000-word range, which takes some of the weight off each individual word.  The same level of intentionality isn’t required as in poetry, and accordingly readers don’t assume that the author is weighing the impact of every word in the same way.  Still, two thousand words is not so many that I can afford to be profligate with them.  If I’m not weighing the use of every conjunction, I’m certainly considering my adjectives and cogitating on my verbs.  Often times, if I’m writing for a hard word limit like for the Elegant Literature submissions, I end up scrutinizing each sentence for ways to make it more efficient.  If there’s a tighter way to say something, I’ll take it to eke out a few more words I can use to actually advance the story somewhere else.  Introducing a new place, a new character, a new scene…that all means spending more words, and I have to make sure it’s worth it, that it will advance the story and help create the impact I want.

But, I’m not always writing to a word limit.  Sometimes, I’m just writing, and I can make the story as long as I want.  Impressions came out at about 180,000 words, but there was nothing saying it had to stop there.  Oh, it might be harder to get it published, but that’s a bridge to cross later, and if I wanted to, I could have made the story 200,000 words, or even 500,000 words.  Well, I did want to finish it at some point, and I’m not that prolific – the words take me a little longer to write than some authors, in part because of that intentionality thing.  Because, yes, even with hundreds of thousands of words, to tell a good story still requires intentionality in storytelling.

I’m more aware of it than I used to be, and it’s slowed down my writing, even though I tell myself that much of the deliberation can wait for the revisions phase of the work.  Word counts aside – they’re a useful metric, but not an end-all-be-all – being intentional about writing, about storytelling, makes the story stronger.  Which is not to say that there are not plenty of good, impactful stories that don’t have intentionality behind every sentence, paragraph, and scene, but being intentional deepens it.  I could write about the way the snow is falling over the mountains just for ambiance, but it matters more if I write about it falling on people.  My readers aren’t mountains (as far as I know), but they are people who can probably relate to the delicate, slightly ticklish feeling of a fat snowflake melting on an exposed wrist.

There is a sense in which writing is not about descriptions, scenes, characters, plots, and actions at all.  Recently, I’ve been thinking of writing instead as shining a spotlight.  It’s impossible, and undesirable, to depict everything, so, like a spotlight highlighting things on a stage, the author must choose what to bring to the reader’s attention.  This is not in the sense of the old “gun on the mantle” idea, but broader, guiding the reader’s gaze rather than holding something up for them to see.  It’s the notion of conversation between the author and the reader, just like we’ve discussed at length in our considerations of oral storytelling.  Intentionality, then, is about manipulating that spotlight, choosing where it should shine, how tight the beam should be, the tint, brightness, and intensity.  And, like a spotlight, you can’t highlight everything at once.  You have to choose.

Where intentionality goes astray is when it focuses too much on the largest of scales.  Those English teachers who so frustrated me with their insistence that every little detail in a story must have some deeper meaning were seeing intentionality, but at the wrong level.  Themes, messages, morals: storytelling isn’t about those things.  They sometimes – perhaps often, if it’s well done – arise naturally from the storytelling, but they aren’t the main event.  Yes, an author might be intentional about the pattern on the swashbuckler’s doublet, but not in the sense of tying it to some ephemeral notion of theme or message.  Or, if that is the point, that author is at great risk of slipping into polemic.  No, the intentionality is tied to the storytelling itself, to plot, character, setting – all those elements which we associate more typically with the spinning of tales.

Being intentional is…hard.  It takes concentration, thought, deliberation, and, perhaps most significantly, time.  If it seems like my writing has slowed down in recent months, this is probably why.  When every little detail, every word choice, becomes an active choice, rather than merely throwing out what sounds right (and what probably only sounds right because it’s some stock phrase I’ve read a hundred times before, like Orwell accused us of using), that’s a lot of conscious choices to make just to write a single sentence, and there are a lot of sentences in a book.  That’s why some, perhaps even most, of the intention is reserved for revisions; it might well be impossible to be fully intentional, to focus on all those decisions and their many interacting facets and variables, simultaneously.  Intention can affect the most fundamental aspects of a story, though, in what scenes you choose to write and how you choose to write them.  And, for all its power, it is only the first step, as intention does nothing to answer which choice to make.  For its potential to strengthen a story, though, it is well worth the effort.