The button opened the door. That was the problem.
In the second Max Aura Dungeon novel, Rae encounters a red button standing directly in front of a closed gate.
Dude tells her to leave it alone.
Rae points out the obvious: there is a button in front of a gate, and they need to get through.
She presses it.
The gate rises a little.
She presses it again. The gate rises farther. Soon they have enough room to pass, but Rae presses a couple more times anyway, partly because Dude has been so irritatingly certain that touching it was a bad idea.
Nothing terrible appears to happen.
The button works.
Farther inside, more buttons open more doors. There are rooms to explore, a missing friend to find, and an increasingly impatient Dude who insists on marking every pedestal they pass.
Then they reach Jimothy.
He is trapped inside a cage. Beside the barrier stands another red button.
Rae presses it.
The gate begins to rise, but an electrical discharge passes through Jimothy’s body.
The familiar buzzing sound acquires a horrifying new meaning.
Rae remembers the previous buttons. The sounds. The doors. The additional presses. She becomes convinced that they have been hurting Jimothy all along.
Dude is more cautious about what they actually know.
That distinction matters.
Rae intended to open doors. Attention designed the circumstances in which opening doors might carry a terrible cost.
And as the person developing the story, I had another set of intentions entirely.
What the author knows
There are moments in writing when knowing too much about a story becomes inconvenient.
I may know why a character is acting strangely, what a seemingly harmless object will eventually do, or how a small decision is supposed to affect events much later.
The character does not know.
Sometimes the reader should not know either.
If the prose begins announcing the significance of everything, the scene loses the experience I wanted to create.
A red button should be allowed to look like a red button.
I became particularly aware of this while developing the Attention material.
During parts of that process, I deliberately avoided giving the AI writing assistance the complete direction of the larger narrative.
I wanted to work through individual episodes without allowing knowledge of later developments to influence every description and exchange.
This came with disadvantages. Less information can make continuity harder to maintain. A scene may develop details that require reconsideration once its place in the larger story becomes clearer.
But I was trying to preserve the immediate experience of the characters rather than having each moment announce the purpose I had assigned to it.
The process involved a peculiar division of knowledge.
I could know something about the destination while deliberately limiting what was available during the journey.
Then I had to examine the result and decide whether it served the story.
The difficulty with intention
In ordinary conversation, asking someone what they meant can resolve an enormous amount of confusion.
If I misunderstand a remark, the speaker can explain it.
If I interpret a joke as an insult, its intention may matter enormously to how I understand what happened.
Literary interpretation is more complicated, partly because the author is not the only person whose intentions exist within the work.
Rae wants to open a gate.
Attention wants to manipulate the people trying to pass through it.
I want the reader to encounter a particular sequence of discoveries.
The reader may initially enjoy Rae’s stubbornness, recognize Dude’s suspicion or begin anticipating the trap before either character understands it.
These intentions and interpretations interact, but they are not identical.
The literary scholar E. D. Hirsch argued that the author’s intended verbal meaning provides an important basis for valid interpretation. His book Validity in Interpretation develops the argument.
One of his concerns was that if a text’s meaning changes completely according to whoever reads it, there may be no stable object left for people to discuss.
That is a serious concern.
I would find literary criticism rather strange if the words in a book placed no constraints on what the book could reasonably be understood to say.
Yet there is another difficulty.
Knowing what I wanted a passage to achieve does not establish that it achieved it.
The text I actually wrote
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley challenged the idea that an author’s intention should be the standard by which the success of a literary work is judged.
Their argument became known as the intentional fallacy.
They were not suggesting that writers never make deliberate choices.
Their objection concerned the authority those intentions should have when evaluating what a work actually accomplishes.
I encounter a practical version of that distinction whenever I revise a scene.
An AI-generated passage may follow my instructions and still sound wrong.
A character intended to seem frightened may instead sound melodramatic. Someone who should be concealing their thoughts may explain them with a clarity that makes the entire conversation feel artificial.
The prose may even describe precisely the emotion I requested.
That does not make it convincing.
I can explain what the scene was supposed to achieve, but the explanation does not repair the words.
I have to change them.
Sometimes a small alteration is enough. Sometimes the problem lies in the character’s reaction, the information available to them or the entire direction of the encounter.
The distinction between my intention and the result becomes obvious the moment I read the passage and realize I do not believe it.
There is also a more enjoyable possibility.
Something unexpected may work better than the idea I started with.
I can discover a direction worth following in a suggestion I had not anticipated.
In that case, the creative intention changes during the work.
I find that much more interesting than pretending every successful development was part of an elaborate original plan.
When the author is wrong about the reader
Return to Rae and the button.
I know what I was trying to accomplish with the sequence. I know how the repetition of harmless-looking actions contributes to the later revelation.
But I cannot guarantee how a reader will respond.
Someone may be suspicious from the first button.
Another may find Rae amusing and Dude excessively cautious.
A third might be so uncomfortable with the situation that the repeated pressing becomes frustrating long before Jimothy is found.
Those reactions are not interchangeable. Some may be closer to the experience I intended than others.
But I cannot make an unwanted reaction disappear by explaining that it was not what I meant.
I can examine whether the writing supported the interpretation. I can consider whether a detail arrived too early, whether the scene concealed too much or whether a character behaved inconsistently.
If I discover a weakness, I can revise it.
What I cannot do is replace the reader’s experience with my explanation of the experience they were supposed to have.
The unexpected meaning
Sometimes people notice things in a work that its creator never consciously intended.
They may recognize a social assumption, an uncomfortable implication or a relationship between events that only becomes apparent when the story is viewed from another perspective.
I would be reluctant to dismiss such a reading solely because I had not thought of it myself.
Nor would I automatically accept every interpretation as equally persuasive.
The text has details, relationships and consequences that support some readings more strongly than others.
I think there is value in allowing the author’s account of the process and the reader’s interpretation of the result to meet without requiring either to surrender completely.
I can explain why I placed a red button in front of a gate.
I can describe what I knew, what I withheld and what I hoped the reader would eventually recognize.
But the scene has to survive without that explanation.
Rae presses the button because it opens the door.
Dude fears what might happen.
Attention has constructed a situation in which those motives can be used against them.
And the reader hears a little buzz that may never sound quite so innocent again.