Bad writing advice

I was told that the need for money could never be the first, foremost motivation of any character. According to this advice, a character should act because they need money and they’re lonely; they need money and have ambition; they need money and have something to prove, whatever. But simply needing money would be a little flimsy and also crass. The people who gave me this advice were rich.

The encouragement to develop all characters, at all times, in as many directions as possible, trumps all other advice. The insistence that humanity lies only in the details, in the snarled backstory, in the contradictions and intricately shaded nuances.

But humanity also lies in the bright blunt planes. People get reduced to cardboard when they’re caught in roaring emotion or ambition or lust or greed. People become boring; they become caricatures; they become shockingly remote. To insist that characters never enter the kind of extremity that flattens them — or to insist that every good character flattening requires an equal and opposite character re-inflation, through meek introspection or lessons learned or whatnot — is close to demanding that every novel become a morality play.

I spent a lot of my time as a writing student determinedly second-guessing every piece of advice that was given to me. It certainly wasn’t the most pleasant or fastest route towards developing as a writer. I remember getting a story back after a workshop with the line « but who cares? » scrawled in the margins, over and over. It was written, as I recall, as a way of urging me to engage the reader further. I didn’t agree with it, but it stung. I read it often, sulking. And then, but who cares? became this sort of armored mantra that I repeated while writing. Let’s try this or that! It’ll probably fail, but who cares? I might be gilding this particular lily, but who cares? I still mutter but who cares? when I’m feeling spiny.