On Intention

In my upcoming Audible Original Backstory, I’ve included a character who is more than a little self-parody. Devon James is a thriller author who insists his books are in fact great literature, that his protagonist Achilles Ghost’s name is an act of layered allusion rather than an adolescent attempt at sounding meaningful, and that his dwindling sales are because people just aren’t quite smart enough to understand his books. The tragic joke of Devon James is that he can’t reconcile what audiences want from him as a writer with what he thinks he is as a writer.
 
I seriously hope I’m not like that but at the same time I do write very pulpy books (that an ex-girlfriend once dismissed as 'airport novels') and I do like to believe there is some thematic heft and depth of character to them despite all the ridiculous action scenes and severed limbs. Within the bounds of my own perception and capability I think I’ve achieved that, but no author gets to declare the value of their own book. You can have be proud of your work, but the real measure of creative success is whether the general consensus of readers matches up with your intention, and even that is hard to gauge because opinions vary and readers find things in your writing you never meant to be there. Which is a good thing, but can certainly obscure any attempt to know for sure that you achieved what you set out to.
 
This is why I think that knowing what you want to achieve and coming back to it throughout the process is so important. This isn’t to say that things can’t change or that a story won’t evolve and surprise you, but that you should have a pretty robust idea of the experience you want to give your readers. That experience is what they’re paying for so it’s helpful to know what you’re intending to offer in exchange for their money.
 
Does this all sound extremely obvious? Maybe, but I have a suspicion a lot of writers might get why I’m saying it. When you start out, for example, you’re far more likely to think about what the story means to you than to your readers (you need to learn to think about both). My first plays, like Hometown or Reunion or Life Without Me, were completely about my own early-adulthood angst; less narratives than hour long expressions of feelings only I had any reason to care about. Later, when I shifted into pseudo noir thriller territory with Below Babylon or The Last Supper, I took to emulating the dark and serious vibes of what I thought a thriller was without actually engaging with why these stories might thrill my theoretical audience. If I had, I wouldn’t have devoted so much of those scripts to drawn out quasi-philosophical conversations that did absolutely nothing to drive the plot or keep audiences on the edge of their seats.
 
Recently I revisited the subject of my perpetually unpublished passion project Windmills and considered why I’ve never been able to realise it despite trying since high school. One of the potential issues I have to reckon with is that the obsessive development of it through my formative years has left it with many big ideas and vivid characters, but little consideration of overall intention because at the time I most worked on it, that was the furthest thing from my mind. I was far more concerned about how the story made me feel than anyone else. The longer you work on something in one particular way, the harder it becomes to change perspective or focus.  
 
Writers in development should be selfish. The job at its most fundamental is to write about what matters to you and with time and experience find ways to make it matter to total strangers. You can’t learn to do that unless you learn what matters to you enough to spend years thinking and writing about it. Because trust me, if you write about what seems important and timely but doesn’t actually eat at you on a fundamental level then your work will always ring hollow. Want proof? Check out any undergraduate creative writing class ever. Also most plays I wrote pre 2015. 
 
But while centring what matters to you is essential, unless you are such an exceptional writer that anything you put on the page will be compelling no matter what (these people exist, they’re just very rare), then you have to learn to consider your audience.
 
Genre is one way to do this. By way of example: if you want to write about the very personal fear of being at a place in your life where you’re not advancing but everyone around you is, then a romantic comedy might be a good place to do it. Look at Bridget Jones’ Diary.
 
This invites the risk of another mistake a lot of writers make – in the same way that it’s pointless to write about themes that aren’t genuinely important to you, you shouldn’t write in a certain genre unless you understand and love that genre. I am often staggered by aspiring writers I speak to who think they can just write a thriller even though they don’t read them. Thriller readers have certain expectations. The only way to understand those expectations is to have them yourself. The only way to do that is to love and know and widely read the genre you intend to write.
 
Figuring out your voice as a writer and how to achieve your intention often comes from consuming stories that make you want to do something similar but in your own way. For my thriller writing, I always bring up the TV shows Hannibal and Banshee, which both found a way to balance deliberate absurdity, dark humour, shocking twists, extreme violence, fascinating characters and emotional depth. They’re very different shows – Banshee is fast paced action and Hannibal is slow burn horror – but both work because there is such clarity of intention from the start. They prove that you can be ridiculous and profound at the same time, and it was somewhere at the nexus of the two that I started to find my own voice and storytelling intention.
 
My thrillers are schlocky. I have never denied that. But my intention is always to make them more than solely that. The Hunted might feature a freshly removed scalp used as a wig, but it’s also about the dark side of small-town masculinity that I grew up around. High Rise involves both a flamethrower and a human head used as defensive weapons in very unconventional ways, but the heart of the book is a father and a daughter learning to understand each other.
 
And my kid’s books aren’t that different. Andromache Between Worlds has dinosaurs fighting cowboys right before a scene where our teenage hero has to grapple with the fact that her mother might never have wanted her. The True Colour of a Little White Lie is about learning empathy and also features a grown man explosively shitting himself during a game of pool. And on it goes.  
 
How do I know the combination works? I don’t. But I know that The Hunted was intended as a read-in-one-sitting pulpy thrill ride that might also make you care about these lonely characters thrown together in an impossible circumstance. Strong sales and hundreds of reviews hailing it as exactly that indicate that for many readers, I achieved what I set out to.
 
Other times, it doesn’t work out. I lost sight of The Inheritance early in the writing process and it wasn’t until a desperate last-minute rewrite that I settled on my John Wick in Melbourne action extravaganza intention. But by that point I was basically doing major surgery to try and make the book not suck, which left very little room for refining what I wanted it to be. There is so much of The Inheritance I’m proud of, but there’s also a reason it never struck the same chord as The Hunted.
 
I always want to entertain you and make you laugh and take you on a ride and also have something human under all the over-the-top action. But it’s important to know how I plan to achieve those things and what my newest book, in and of itself, is. Sometimes it works better than others, but the books that have been the best received tend to be the ones where I’ve been clearest on my intentions from start to finish. 

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