Intention by Ginny Fite

By Ginny Fite

No one pointed to you in fourth grade and said, “You are a writer.” Well, maybe some of you, but mostly writers are self-anointed. No one makes us do this. So, why do we engage in an activity that often gives us such angst? After a decade of full-time fiction writing, I’ve found the simplest answer.

Perhaps you’ve read this definition of author intention: “An author’s purpose is the main reason he or she has for writing. The three basic purposes are to inform, to persuade, and to entertain.” 

This definition imposes the characteristic of “usefulness” on the activity of writing and implies that if the product doesn’t inform, persuade, or entertain, then it has failed. Purpose is defined by results, and success is determined by audience response. In this paradigm, you, the author, are a useful tool.

I suggest an alternative: an author’s main reason for writing is to write. The activity of writing is selfish. For me, writing is an adventure, the spaceship I use to navigate the galaxy of my mind.

Unlike driving, which purposefully gets us from here to there, the experience of writing—the discovery of the right word for the right spot in the right sentence in the right paragraph in the right chapter at the right moment in the universe of that story—gives me joy.

The text made up of all those words may inform, persuade, or entertain, but really, I put one word after the other because I must. If I’m not scribbling or typing, I’m writing in my head—imagining, picturing, shaping, waking in the middle of the night with a plot solution, stumbling upon the right word or line to express what I’m thinking.

Clamp on a few commas and semi-colons, buckle up the safety belt of the three-act structure, don the gloves of language, a headlamp to see three feet in front of you, and off you go into the wilds of fiction writing. If you’re a plotter, you add a few sherpas and a map, so you know where you’re headed.

The impulse to write, the physical act of observing, thinking, feeling, and putting down symbols has nothing to do with how an audience responds to the work. The writer’s first purpose is to satisfy herself and her own dark ends—perhaps to hold up a mirror to the world, and that intention consciously or unconsciously guides our choices as we write and revise. 

You may hope the finished product will shake the world awake, or make people laugh and cry, but you can’t control reader reaction. Ten people may have ten different responses to the same novel. They may even have different names for your main character or change the title of your book when they tell someone about it. The story becomes theirs, and changes creep into their memory of it, particularly if they loved it.

When I started writing for me (as opposed to a particular paymaster), my intention was to craft a poem. Simple enough. Fourteen lines, with a particular rhyme, rhythm, and stanza pattern. But with a bang in the last line, a twist, a reverse, something that would set my skin atingle and lift the poem out of the expected. I moved on to short stories—still a form in which I could easily see the end—with an identical goal.

My next goal was to write a novel. Amassing seventy-some-thousand words in some kind of logical order to tell a story seemed difficult enough. Soon, I discovered that certain effects—like magic tricks—could induce feelings in readers, and I practiced. A lot. For four more novels. I now have eight novels out in the world—causing trouble, I hope—with another soon to be published, and I’m working on three more. (Yes, at the same time, each at various stages. Don’t ask.)

A year ago, I got to the point where I knew that what I intended to do with writing was to break my reader’s heart and show her how sometimes love and beauty, or kindness, can mend it. 

That intention guides my choice of tone, voice, characters, words, actions, phrasing, flow, pace, sequencing of chapters, what parts to show and which to tell, and how much I’m willing to trust the story to take me where it wants to go. 

My intention may result in mysteries, thrillers, time-travel adventure, women’s fiction, suspense, or whatever frame leaves me room to do something I haven’t done. Sometimes I don’t know what I’ve written until I’ve made two passes through the entire thing.

What I’ve discovered is that when the writer works from her intention rather than with her attention on audience or trends or a paint-by-numbers plot structure, the work feels authentic. It resonates regardless of subject, form, or genre, and readers respond to that authenticity.

For the writer, the experience of writing from your intention is often that of being a channel for the story rather than a maker of it. Writing a story may feel mysterious, dazzling, surprising, and a little scary, but so is standing on a mountain peak. 

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Ginny Fite’s latest novel is LEAVE EVERYTHING YOU KNOW BEHIND. Her ninth novel, SANCTUARY, about a mother’s harrowing journey to save her children, will be published by Sunbury Press. 

LEAVE EVERYTHING YOU KNOW BEHIND

Cranky, aging newspaper publisher Anne Canfield is determined to live forever, no matter what. Young, brilliant writer and teacher Indira Anand thinks she wants to die. But the winter morning Anne saves Indira Anand from drowning, everything changes.

That evening, Anne stumbles and falls. Diagnosed shortly after her fall with incurable brain cancer and only months to live, she must hurry to save her newspaper, heal her regrets, keep her secrets hidden, and protect her son from the truth before time runs out.

Indira, suffering a second incidence of ovarian cancer, wants to invoke her right to die. Thwarted by both the law and her distant husband but desperate to escape the pain she watched her grandmother endure, she wavers, unsure of her decision.

Out of options, Indira reaches out to Anne. Even as they make a pact to help each other, Indira realizes Anne won’t live long enough to be with her at the end. She must find another way.

Meanwhile, Anne’s daughter-in-law, Laura, suffering her own loss and resentful of her husband Freddy’s flagging attention, discovers Anne’s secret. In a move she’s sure will hasten Anne’s death, Laura locates Anne’s old lover, Colin, and goads him to turn up at Anne’s home, hoping he’ll upset the family she hates. For good measure, in an attempt to cause a rift between mother and son, Laura suggests to Freddy that Colin is his father.

Leave is a story about what keeps us wanting to live, what we’ll do for redemption, and how love can save us.

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