Spite: it's what's motivational!

So it’s been a minute since I did much with this website, largely because of plague but also because of lazy, and for that I do apologize: however, I’ve come up with some things to say.

Back when I was in undergrad, and much later in the MFA program, I had ~creative writing~ teachers who said — with the kind of unconscious condescension that comes from not knowing what the hell you’re talking about — that I should “really try to avoid genre.” Pronounced as if “genre” were synonymous with “genital warts.”

And I wasn’t alone in those classrooms. It wasn’t just me being told that genre was less than, was not serious literature, was unsophisticated and childish. There are people in writing classes all over the world being told that lie right now.

I want, so much, to be able to walk into those teachers’ classrooms and be like “hey, remember when you told me to avoid (shudder, patronize, sneer) genre? Suck my three-book contract. To begin with.” Partly for the looks on their faces, but mostly, if I’m being honest, for the students in the class: hey, guess what? You don’t have to write the next short story about people who don’t like each other not liking each other, or the next novel about middle-aged English professors contemplating adultery! You can write whatever you damn well please, and this kind of gatekeeping is unhelpful in the extreme.

Which brings me to spite as a motivational tool. I use it all the time, for myself and for my characters. A lot of my people are in situations where they are at a disadvantage, physically or mentally or strategically, and instead of going “well I can’t do this, not gonna try” their reaction is fuck you, watch me.

It’s a relative of “hold my beer,” but instead of “I can TOTALLY do something even stupider than that” it’s no, I will not let [task, situation, object] win, I am GOING to find a way to do this, goddamn it. Using this as a character trait allows for a lot of interesting situations to develop: people doing things they clearly should not do, that they are not suited to, that they are going to damn well do anyway because fuck you, watch me, and…doing those things. It’s bloody-mindedness; it’s also determination, and it can lead to unexpected solutions as your character finds a workaround to the impossible situation because they are not going to let some idiotic [whatever it is] win, dammit.

Fuck you, watch me is also a variant of one can always do what one must: it’s also related to failure is not an option. The latter two are divorced from spite, at least on the surface, but for my money it underlies all three. As a motivator spite is extremely efficient; it should not be the only motivator, but there’s nothing wrong with using it to fuel your creative drive. It’s a bit like a nice shot of nitromethane to the gas tank: you’re still driving the car, you want the car to go in this direction, only now you have a hell of a lot more power pushing you forward. Embrace the spite. Let it flow through you. And then go write something your old creative-writing prof would have given a C.

Perhaps a C-minus. Go nuts.