Craft Thoughts: Strategic Opacity
“Strategic Opacity” is an idea that I got from this really wonderful talk from writer Torrey Peters, which she gave a couple years ago as part of the Tin House Workshop series and is available online for free. In her talk she discusses Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the non-sensical actions of the people and protagonist in that work. Hamlet’s actions and professed motivations seem to be at tremendous odds, in direct opposition. It doesn’t make sense, not in the way we have come to believe we should understand character development and motivation. It is exactly these unexplained bits that make Hamlet a great play.
The linked talk is a great one because the topic is thoughtful and provocative—I originally listened to it more than a month ago and I am still thinking about it—and because Torrey Peters is an engaging speaker whose work is at the forefront of contemporary writing. Her latest book, Stag Dance, was recently released and, in addition to new work, republishes some of her previously self-published novellas. Her work bends genre to the point of breaking and pushes us to question the things we think we know, to look easy answers in the eye and see the Scooby-Doo villain mask they use to hide the messier, cosmic, nebulous truths.
I have found myself turning over the term “strategic opacity” like a stone since listening to this talk. It has helped me solidify something I had been seeing in my own work that I didn’t like and couldn’t name.
When I begin a short story, or an essay, or anything else really, I tend to have things start “in media res” as it where, at this particular action point and then I move backwards in time to explain things. Over and over again when I am writing I find myself moving away from the MOMENT and into the backstory. I find myself developing complex backgrounds and set pieces from the past that will explain the “present” of the story. Sometimes that background becomes much bigger than the story I set down to write.
To a point, this is helpful, it is even perhaps interesting to the reader, but most often, it slams the breaks on my narrative. It answers questions no one was asking. It flattens the complex, complicated, inexplicable into something formulaic.
It supposes that character or human actions or motivations can be explained that every action is a direct result of a previous event.
It assumes that a story must be a certain thing, a character study. A psychological examination into the past of a character.
I don’t believe in that, in stories or in people. I cannot look at you, or anyone I may meet or already know, and see into your past or your present or brain. Even if I could, it wouldn’t answer everything for me. I CAN do that for myself and I remain largely unknowable, finding my own desires somewhat nebulous, occasionally concerning.
So, I turn the stone of “strategic opacity” over again and again, I am wearing it smooth in my hands. There is what I can know and what I can’t and then there is the question of how much it matters. I am thinking about how much to give and how much to hide and how storytelling is the tension between the two.
And I ask, what do you need to know?
