Discovery Is More Powerful Than Intention

There’s a persistent and misleading myth in the arts that the best work comes from the clearest vision … that the artist who knows exactly what she wants before she begins is the artist most likely to achieve something worth having. This is largely nonsense. Sound designer here.

Intention is useful the way a trailhead is useful. It gets you into the woods. But the trail you planned to follow and the one you actually find yourself on are not always the same, and the unplanned one is almost always more interesting. The problem with intention is that it is bounded by what we already know, what we’ve already seen or heard, what we already believe to be possible. When we set out to execute a vision, we are essentially illustrating our own limitations.

Serendipity doesn’t have that problem. Neither does failure, or boredom, or the accidental mark, or the weird sound that turns out to be the right sound. These things arrive from outside the intention … from the material itself, from the body moving without the mind’s supervision, from the simple fact that the world is more complicated than our ideas about it. The painter who slips and drags a wet brush somewhere he didn’t plan to drag it has just received new information. The question is whether there is the will to figure out if it is useful information.

Most artists, if they’re honest, will tell you that the best things in their work surprised them. Not everything … intention does its job, sets the table, establishes the conditions … but the moments that lift a piece from competent to alive tend to be the ones that weren’t in the plan. The jazz musician who hits a note he didn’t intend and then bends the next phrase to meet it. The writer who gives a minor character one throwaway line and suddenly realizes that’s who the book is really about.  The sound designer who accidentally drags the wrong sound from the library, then realizes it’s way more interesting than the one intended.

What we dream up in our heads is always simpler than what reality offers back to us when we engage with it. The sketch in the mind is clean. The actual painting is resistant, unpredictable, full of feedback. That resistance isn’t failure … it’s the material thinking back. The trick is learning to hear it. Having the patience to hear it.

This requires a particular kind of humility that our culture doesn’t reward very well. We like intention. We like the story of the artist who had a vision and brought it into being through sheer force of will. It’s a satisfying narrative. It also leaves out the most generative parts of almost every creative process — the wandering, the scrapping, the discovering that what you thought you were making was only the door into what you were actually going to make.

“Let it happen” is harder advice to follow than “make it happen,” because it asks you to tolerate uncertainty for longer than is comfortable. It asks you to trust that something smarter than your plan is available to you, if you stay in the room long enough and keep your grip loose enough to receive it.

Just today I found a set of fluttering sounds, accidentally, ones it never would have occurred to me to go looking for, that I think will be the basis of a sinister creature I’m working on. Intention got me to the canvas. The rest was mostly listening, then editing. A lot of the best sounds I’ve made have come more from discovery than invention.