Central to Tim Ingold’s Making is the notion that “making is a correspondence between maker and material;” that creation is not a matter of imposing your will on the world, but to engage with it; that in the unique properties of every material exists a sort of agency that, in correspondence with your own, shapes the final work. This material may be a piece of clay, a paintbrush, an axe, a violin, matter. But, as I will argue in this paper, this relationship of correspondence may be more universal than applying only to matter; that the material we correspond with may be an idea.
The art form of writing, an abstraction of story, thought, and ideas alloyed only by language, is where we see most clearly this correspondence between maker and idea. Perhaps no writer is better a manifestation of Ingold’s principle of making responsively, reflexively, and in correspondence with than Charlie Kaufman. In his 2011 BAFTA lecture on screenwriting, he wrote: “A screenplay is an exploration. It’s about the thing you don’t know. It’s a step into the abyss. It necessarily starts somewhere, anywhere; there is a starting point but the rest is undetermined, It is a secret, even from you. There’s no template for a screenplay, or there shouldn’t be.” Kaufman, screenwriter of such surreal and labyrinthine narratives as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is known for his complex, layered, and often relatable work. Perhaps the iconic and idiosyncratic nature of his projects are thanks to a specific process, one that does not begin with predetermination but with exploration, one that rejects a pre-composed design, and privileges the ideas he works with as shaping the final work. If you’ve read Ingold’s Making, this approach should sound familiar.
“Allow yourself the freedom to change as you discover, allow your screenplay to grow and change as you work on it. You will discover things as you work. You must not put these things aside, even if they’re inconvenient.” Here, Kaufman encourages the writer to change their initial ‘design’ for a screenplay as they are making it. If you’ve ever written anything substantial, you might have shifted gears after a discovery during research, been inspired by an idea from another work that shaped your own, or noticed that a phrase or an argument didn’t sound quite right when put into words, despite your initial intent. Just as a sculptor looks for certain clays and pigments and shapes them to their liking, a writer goes out into the world and learns the truth about certain ideas, concepts, and things, either through deliberate research or human experience, and weaves them together into an argument or a story. Then, like the sculptor reacts to the texture, weight and strength of the clay and adjusts their work accordingly, the writer shapes their story according to the concepts and ideas they’ve learned and encountered. Your writing doesn’t come straight from your head to paper. At some time or another, you got all your ideas from somewhere, and they shape your work as much as you do. You aren’t interacting with physical matter, or collaborating with another person, but there’s clearly something affecting your work here that isn’t you. This secret collaborator, then, may be the agency of ideas, concepts, things; the truths of the world that are a secret to you, but that you can go out and discover. Justice, redemption, war, infinity, the Vietnamese punk scene, our inner desires, father-daughter relationships, what it’s like to live as a janitor, these are the materials of a writer. These are what films, and books, and stories are about. Just as a sculptor makes with clay, a writer makes with these concepts. And just as a seamstress cannot pull a thread so far that it snaps, a writer cannot betray the truth of an idea.
But, you may object, you can make an idea in your story or essay or lecture to be whatever you want – objects however, do push back against you, literally; they have physical limits. If you don’t correspond to their agency they will actually shatter, melt, break. It’s true, this is a noteworthy distinction. Consider, however, a story about the idea of romantic relationships – one about a guy that gets into a relationship and is therefore freed from all sadness. This story has ignored the truth about romantic relationships; that they have flaws, that they aren’t all there is to life, that they are not, truly, a cure for sadness. Contained within the idea of relationships is that naked truth about ourselves that we’ve all likely experienced. And in making with it, in putting it into your story, that truth exerts a sort of agency in your work. The writer does have the choice to ignore it, just like the carpenter has the choice to ignore the tensile strength of cedar, but just as that lazy carpenter’s house will crumble sometime or another, that writer’s work, in Charlie Kaufman’s eyes, will become forgotten, irrelevant and inapplicable to our human experience, because it is not true to their experience. It is not true to what they really think if they really sat with it, or who they really are. As Kaufman puts it: “I think you need to be willing to be naked when you do anything creatively in film or any other form, that’s really what you have to do because otherwise it’s very hard to separate it from marketing.”
Of course, truth, famously, is subjective. But there are many writers who have written work that is not true to themselves; not because they really have a different view on what the truth of the matter is, but because they’ve ignored it – because the story would not have been as exciting or marketable or formulaic if they had taken the time to think about how things really are. Kaufman argues that “…we’ve been conned into thinking there is a pre-established form. Like any big business, the film business believes in mass production. It’s cheaper and more efficient as a business model.” He quotes Harold pinter in saying “A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity… you find no shelter, no protection, unless you lie. In which case, of course, you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.” We can think of a formulaic screenplay that ignores the truth of human experience much like a politician’s promises, a cheap mass-produced blender or a prefabricated house – sooner or later, it will have to be replaced. Shlocky, formulaic novels and lazily written, straight-to-DVD movies can be entertaining for a while but they don’t tend to be remembered like works that really tried to sit with an idea, find the universal human truth in it and see what they could truly make with it. Just like materials, ideas can last a long time, can continue to be relatable, insightful and truthful to our lives as humans, if we acknowledge their agency; if we try to understand how they really work instead of how we think they should, if we experiment with them, put them together in new ways and wait honestly to see how they correspond with each other and ourselves. In other words, whether the maker is corresponding with materials or ideas, they must make with the truth of the matter.
Ingold, Tim. “Making: Archaeology, Art & Architecture.” Routledge, 2013.
Kaufman, Charlie. “Screenwriter’s Lecture: Charlie Kaufman” BAFTA, 2011.
Pinter, Harold. “Nobel Prize Lecture” The Nobel Foundation, 2008.
Written by Daniel Schatz.
Hi Daniel!
I find your article providing a very interesting way to interpret materiality in media through considering the source, influence and the actual nature of concepts, rather than the idea of concepts. By explaining how the ideas and concepts are reflected and applied in writing as well as other mediated works and their relationship to influence and endurance in time, your expression of the importance of seeing the concepts through a material perspective is clearly and nicely illustrated. This made me consider about various ways we can apply materiality thinking to everyday situations.
I do have some inquiries on when determining a concept’s nature, in which we normally also navigate through experience and emotions. Concepts in my opinion are far more subjective than media and actual objects, so an even thinner line draws between the areas of objectivity and irrational interpretation of the concepts. On the other hand, some works which expresses niche interpretations on emotions can also have quite an influence and evoke resonance amongst the public. How materiality in these circumstances comes in also seems interesting in my view.
Thanks for the insightful article! I gained much from reading and extending on your ideas.
Hi Betty,
Thank you for the feedback! It’s totally different for everybody how they navigate what the truth about a concept or idea like love or power is, and theres lots of different ways each person could write about it. You’re right, concepts are far more subjective than things like actual objects. However, I think you can make a clear distinction between really considering a concept and writing about it honestly, versus deliberately ignoring or not taking the time to think about concepts in order to follow story conventions (as Kaufman says, don’t ignore the inconvenient truths you discover while writing). Though it is subjective, there is a truth about an idea *to you*, and I would argue that to write something universal, or profound or enduring, you have to work with the truth of it, not fight against it – much like a sculptor has to work with the materiality of clay rather than trying to force it into a predetermined shape. This is what I think Kaufman is getting at in his speech. Thanks for commenting!
Hi Daniel!
Yet another great post on your part. I really admire how eloquent you are in your explanations and explorations.
It takes a lot of thoughtfulness and care to take Ingold’s literally hands-on approach to media and make it into an immaterial theory. Still, you succeeded and also did an amazing job explaining this complex theory in an easily understood manner.
I was also thinking of more interactive ways of working with ideas and, in that way, reflecting ones own experiences and truth. Actors and role-players (e.g. D&D players), I feel like, are doing a similar work as writers, but do so on the spot and, often, in a group. Again, there is an idea of truth that can but really shouldn’t be ignored – otherwise, people throw tomatoes at you or stop inviting you over. Do you think this element of interactivity and instant feedback helps or distracts from the “truth of the matter”?
Great connection Bara! I think a good way of thinking about this in terms of TTRPG’s is that the writer (the GM)’s goal is to tell a story that is satisfying to every player. What’s cool about running a game like that is that both the mechanical and story elements of the game are working toward that end. If the GM sets up this great dragon as the final epic climax of the story, but then it gets killed by one attack, the mechanics have betrayed the truth all the players were setting up on the quest — that they are on a difficult journey to kill a powerful dragon. That would be an example of mechanics making the story unsatisfying. By the same token, if something really big and traumatic happens to all the characters but the GM and players don’t show that it had consequences in the story, that has also betrayed the truth the story has been setting up. Truth as I’m using it here can be totally different depending on the medium and totally subjective, its more about consistency with the goal and within the work itself. Actors are an interesting example, I think depending on how they work, their material might be their own personal experiences, which they combine with the character as it was written. An actor who needs to play losing a loved one might try to really feel the truth of a similar experience they had. They could ham it up for the camera, but that would betray the truth of what those experiences are really like, and the consistency of how that character would react. That’s how I would think about it!
Hey Daniel! The way you extend Ingold’s idea of correspondence from physical materials to ideas makes so much sense. I like how you frame writing as something that isn’t just produced, but discovered through the back-and-forth between the writer and whatever concept they’re working with. Your use of Kaufman fit so well too! His approach to letting a story shift as you go really supports your point about ideas having their own kind of agency. The bit about “betraying the truth of an idea” really landed for me as it’s such a clear way to explain why some writing feels honest and some feels more formulaic. This definitely made me think about how much our work changes once we actually sit with an idea instead of trying to force it. Do you ever find yourself surprised by where an idea takes you when you start writing?
Hi Nate. Absolutely! I’m always surprised by where my writing goes, that’s why I think both Ingold’s theory of correspondence and Charlie Kaufman’s speeches on writing made so much sense to me. Even writing for this class, every time I try to determine my thesis or main point before I’ve gone out and gotten my sources or tried to fully grasp the point of the material, my project turns out a lot worse and my argument falls apart. Most of the time, the truth of whatever I’m writing about is something I have to go out and learn and work with.
I really enjoyed this post because you made the connection between Ingold and Kaufman feel really intuitive. The idea that writers “make” with concepts the same way a sculptor works with clay was such a cool way to think about writing, and it honestly made Ingold’s argument click for me in a way the reading alone didn’t. Your examples, like how a story falls apart when it ignores the actual truth of an idea, felt really relatable, especially the part about romantic relationships. The Kaufman quotes fit perfectly, too, and you used them in a way that actually supported your point instead of just plugging them in. Overall, the piece flowed really nicely and made the theory feel alive rather than abstract.
Hi Daniel! I really enjoyed your post and how you connected Tim Ingold’s idea of “making as correspondence” to Charlie Kaufman’s writing process. I liked how you emphasized that ideas, like physical materials, have an agency that shapes the final work, and that writing requires responding to this truth rather than imposing a pre-set design. Your example of how a story about relationships can fail if it ignores the reality of human experience really clarified how ideas push back on us, just as materials do. It also made me think about how this applies beyond writing—any creative work, from film to design, seems to succeed when we correspond with the materials or ideas instead of forcing them.