how were so many of the things that were basic writing/plotting advice in Every Single craft book when I was a teenager just completely straight up wrong
the biggest and worst offender I think was plotting advice that encouraged me to build my plot around my characters "desires" or "goals"
protagonists were kind of forced into a flat dichotomy of 'active' (takes actions to further their own goals, thus driving the story) and 'passive' (is acted upon by events beyond their control, moving them through the plot) with 'active' being considered good and passive being considered bad
I think this framework is very locked within a certain cultural viewpoint... specifically of a 20th century western white male. For one thing it assumes a "protagonist" will have a certain level of agency, to have goals and pursue them, overcoming obstacles in the way. It is not very inclusive of characters that don't have much agency.
It also assumes that desire/want = orienting toward or pursuing.
As far as I am concerned, characters don't have goals. They CAN, but these goals aren't actually the functional gears of the plot, and are instead their conscious rationalizations of what's really running the show.
Rather, characters have instincts and drives. I don't like to say "desires" because desire suggests something that is explicit, a thing that the character can attribute their feelings to.
I realized when reading Shakespeare's Othello that interesting characters often can't be understood in terms of "goals" or "desires" because they don't understand what they want or why they want that and they constantly act in ways that are contradictory to what they want or think they want. What a character consciously thinks is a whole layer on top of their actual instincts and feelings, which are primal and buried in traumas and needs and other aspects of creaturehood, and often is a fiction to resolve contradictions and dissonance in the demands of the creature-self. some characters can reflect upon their own thought processes and some cannot.
real humans don't often act rationally to pursue goals, they just do stuff based upon a seethe of inner instinct and the reasons why are post-hoc rationalizations. i like writing characters that reflect this and exploring the ways they do and don't understand themselves, the fictions they use to understand what's going on in there
