#to help them avoid common pitfalls of the inexperienced. because you just don't have time for personally tailored student-specific advice

[ailuronymy]

The Erins are so fricking bad about making plots that entirely hinge on the protagonist(s) being the only functional/competent individual and/or just making everyone else grossly incompetent/stupid.

Like for real my old English teacher told me “if your story’s main conflict could be fixed by someone talking to someone else over a mild misunderstanding , then you need to work on it”

But that is literally the plot of at least three warrior cat arcs.

While I definitely agree that Erin Hunter’s plots are extremely thin and often poorly made and poorly thought through, I don’t actually agree with your teacher--which I have no problems saying, since I’m also an English and creative writing teacher. 

I feel that a lot of writing advice people offer isn’t actually any good wholesale, and that context makes a significant different re: how useful and relevant a piece of writing advice is for a specific person’s specific work. This advice sort of implicitly implies that any plot that could theoretically be solved if the characters “just talked” about things isn’t “good” writing, and therefore needs to be improved. 

But that’s just not true. Some of my favourite Shakespearean plays are built primarily on character misunderstandings, but they remain compelling stories even so, because of how those misunderstandings are told. And that’s kind of the thing that advice of this sort skips over--it will tell you what to do, but doesn’t often explain why that rule of thumb has become popular. 

The reason people make broad strokes like this and claim that people hate misunderstanding-based tropes/narratives is because people hate contrived misunderstandings. In other words, people hate when characters who have no reason not to talk simply don’t communicate with each other--because it seems incorrect for the characters and thus it breaks the verisimilitude of the story. Reading is kind of engaging in an implicit contract with the writer, at least for most types of fiction. The writer says: believe me that what I say is real, and I will tell you a good story; and the reader says: tell me a good story, and I will believe you. If the writer breaks the contract by writing something that does not feel real after requesting the reader buy into their world and story, then the reader is yanked unceremoniously out of the story and is usually and understandably pretty mad about that. 

I think that’s often where you get criticism of “bad writing” that people can’t really articulate the cause of. People can usually recognise when the writing isn’t holding up its end of this bargain, and when the reader is getting shafted quite unfairly after their buy-in to the work, but can’t always explain how or why they know that. 

Anyway. For comparison, look how popular and beloved tropes like “mutual pining” or similar is, when overwhelmingly that particular style of plot is based in two people misunderstanding the feelings, words, and/or intentions of another, and then not communicating their own feelings or questioning their assumptions of the situation or inquiring after the truth at length. Those circumstances would be solved by “just talking” (the word just does so much to make talking seem easy, doesn’t it?)--but how many people with a crush, especially on a close friend, see “tell them how you feel, directly” as a simple and easy option? 

To suggest that talking openly and honestly in that situation doesn’t require courage and maturity, doesn’t require a scary amount of vulnerability, isn’t a considerable risk in several ways, wouldn’t be accurate. So we recognise that it’s a form of verisimilitude for characters in this situation not to speak openly, and so we don’t feel it’s contrived. But it’s still often informed by and built upon misunderstandings--it’s just that a lot of people either don’t notice that, or actually find joy and delight in the trope of misunderstandings when it contributes to the overall experience of the narrative. 

So yeah! Don’t want to 1. defend Erin Hunter (heaven forbid) or 2. school your teacher, but I don’t think misunderstanding as a trope is good or bad, and advice that suggests one way or the other isn’t really credible to me. It’s just a tool, and the only real factor is how good the writer is at using it + selecting the right context to do so. 

#also! don't want to imply your teacher wasn't doing a good job because i understand exactly how this advice came about #you only have a limited amount of time and a lot of content to get through + also a lot of writing advice is really complex and nuanced #and when you're teaching high school levels of anything a lot of the time the trade-off is in easily digestible *generally true* information #so that's when you get advice like 'don't use adverbs' + 'avoid x trope'. it's a guiding principle for young new writers #to help them avoid common pitfalls of the inexperienced. because you just don't have time for personally tailored student-specific advice #if you say 'don't use adverbs. find strong verbs instead' you are in fact setting your students up well for where they currently are. #but the advice 'don't use adverbs' is actually subjective and honestly wrong. so it's not good *long-term* advice. #but in the short term your students will immediately jump from wishy-washy prose to a way better grasp on effective writing + self-editing. #so that's a win and you move on to the next module and do the same thing. the quote unquote bad advice isn't malicious. #in many ways it's just created from the inherent pressures of institutionalised education--especially in a classroom setting like that.