{"id":931,"date":"2025-11-24T23:05:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T06:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/?p=931"},"modified":"2025-11-24T23:06:56","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T06:06:56","slug":"corresponding-with-ideas-making-writing-charlie-kaufman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/931","title":{"rendered":"Corresponding With Ideas: Making, Writing & Charlie Kaufman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Central to Tim Ingold\u2019s Making <\/em>is the notion that \u201cmaking is a correspondence between maker and material;\u201d 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. <\/em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s principle of making responsively, reflexively, and in correspondence with <\/em>than Charlie Kaufman. In his 2011 BAFTA lecture on screenwriting, he wrote: \u201cA screenplay is an exploration. It\u2019s about the thing you don\u2019t know. It\u2019s 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\u2019s no template for a screenplay, or there shouldn\u2019t be.\u201d 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, <\/em>this approach should sound familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAllow 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\u2019re inconvenient.\u201d Here, Kaufman encourages the writer to change<\/em> their initial \u2018design\u2019 for a screenplay as they are making it. If you\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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\u2019t interacting with physical matter, or collaborating with another person, but there\u2019s clearly something affecting your work here that isn\u2019t you. <\/em>This secret collaborator, then, may be the agency <\/em>of ideas<\/em>, concepts, things<\/em>; the truths of the world that are a secret to you, but that you can go out and discover. Justice, redemption, war, infinity,<\/em> the Vietnamese punk scene, our inner desires,<\/em> father-daughter relationships, what it\u2019s like to live as a janitor, <\/em>these are the materials of a writer. These are what films, and books, and stories are about. Just as a sculptor makes <\/em>with clay, a writer makes <\/em>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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, you may object, you can <\/em>make an idea in your story or essay or lecture to be whatever you want \u2013 objects however, do <\/em>push back against you, literally; they have physical limits. If you don\u2019t correspond to their agency they will actually <\/em>shatter, melt, break. It\u2019s true, this is<\/em> a noteworthy distinction. Consider, however, a story about the idea of romantic relationships \u2013 one about a guy that gets into a relationship and is therefore freed from all sadness. This story has ignored <\/em>the truth about romantic relationships; that they have flaws, that they aren\u2019t all there is to life, that they are not, truly, a cure for sadness. Contained within the idea <\/em>of relationships is that naked truth about ourselves that we\u2019ve all likely experienced. And in making <\/em>with it, in putting it into your story, that truth exerts a sort of agency in your work. The writer do<\/em>es 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\u2019s house will crumble sometime or another, that writer’s work, in Charlie Kaufman\u2019s 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: \u201cI think you need to be willing to be naked when you do anything creatively in film or any other form, that\u2019s really what you have to do because otherwise it\u2019s very hard to separate it from marketing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, truth, famously, is subjective. But there are many writers who have written work that is not true to themselves<\/em>; not because they really have a different view on what the truth of the matter is, but because they\u2019ve ignored it \u2013 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 \u201c…we\u2019ve been conned into thinking there is a pre-established form. Like any big business, the film business believes in mass production. It\u2019s cheaper and more efficient as a business model.\u201d He quotes Harold pinter in saying \u201cA writer\u2019s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity\u2026 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.\u201d We can think of  a formulaic screenplay that ignores the truth of human experience much like a politician\u2019s promises, a cheap mass-produced blender or a prefabricated house \u2013 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\u2019t 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,<\/em> 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 <\/em>maker <\/em>is corresponding with materials or ideas, they must make<\/em> with the truth<\/em> of the matter.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ingold, Tim. “Making: Archaeology, Art & Architecture.” Routledge, 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kaufman, Charlie. “Screenwriter’s Lecture: Charlie Kaufman” BAFTA, 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pinter, Harold. “Nobel Prize Lecture” The Nobel Foundation<\/em>, 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written by Daniel Schatz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Central to Tim Ingold\u2019s Making is the notion that \u201cmaking is a correspondence between maker and material;\u201d 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 … Continue reading Corresponding With Ideas: Making, Writing & Charlie Kaufman<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","tag-media-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":935,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions\/935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}