Whatever works — and is true …

 … On the Case for Meanness in Fiction. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What is good for you as a person is often bad for you as a writer. People will tell you that this not true, and some of the people who will tell you that are also writers, but they are bad writers, at least when they try to convince you, and themselves, that the most important thing for a fiction writer to have is compassion. Flannery O’Connor suggested in her essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” (1960) that compassion was perhaps the most overrated of all the fiction writer’s supposed imperatives: “It’s considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth and which no book jacket can do without. It is a quality which no one can put his finger on in any exactly critical sense, so it is always safe for anybody to use.” In other words, O’Connor suggests that compassion—as shown by a writer by way of her fiction—is important only to nitwits and cowards.