I. Your friend emails you something they’ve written (or recorded, or shot and edited). “Will you read this?” they say, “and tell me what you think?”

Several things go through your mind:

1. I barely have time to read things I’ve paid for!
2. What if it’s awful? 
3. How truthful do they want me to be about it?
4. How did they get this address?

II. You work on something for weeks, months, maybe even years. You send it to your friend. “Will you read this?” you say, “and tell me what you think?”

As soon as you click Send, several things go through your mind:

1. I’ve made a huge mistake.
2. No, this is great. The thing I wrote is great. They’re going to be amazed! Maybe they’ll even tell that editor friend of theirs!
3. You know what? Even if it needs a lot of work, that’s a good thing. It’s better to know. I hope they’re honest with me.
4. I’ve made a huge mistake.

In each case, we have what might be called an agenda. The creator wants to be handled a certain way, the reader worries about his or her level of responsibility. There are several most likely outcomes for this scenario.

Here are the best cases:

• The reader likes the piece overall, and has several constructive criticisms that might help make it even better
• The reader does not like the piece much, and can point out exactly where it doesn’t work for them

Here are the worst cases:

• The reader barely reads the piece and offers only superficial comments (e.g., “I didn’t like the names,” or “this was good.”)
• The reader has only negative things to say about the piece

And here’s the case that will never happen:

• The reader says: “Oh my God, this was great! I was amazed! And you’ll be happy to know, I gave it to that editor friend of mine. She says she’ll call you in an hour.”

On that last one: I’m not saying it couldn’t ever happen. I’m saying stop thinking it will. That way, if it ever does, it’ll be an honest-to-god surprise.

So what are the responsibilities for the reader/listener/viewer of someone’s creative work?

1. Be completely honest – you are being asked to give your opinion on something because your opinion counts. If you don’t take it seriously, or if you try to spare the person’s feelings, you are doing them a disservice.
2. Be gentle – at the same time, be mindful of your approach. Take into account the kind of person you’re dealing with.
3. Be specific – “I liked this” or “This was fun” are not helpful comments. They’re great starters! But then you need to get specific. “I like this because I so rarely see this kind of character” is better. Likewise, “The dialogue was bad” is not so helpful. What about it is bad? Is it bad because people don’t really talk like that? Or is it bad because it’s too lifelike and thus doesn’t really go anywhere?
4. Talk about it in the present tense - Wait, what? This one comes courtesy of the amazing author Alice Mattison, with whom I studied in graduate school. Her idea is that if you talk about a work in the past tense, it begins to feel closed-off, like a done deal. If you talk in the present tense, it maintains the quality of being in-progress. This thing has a future, in other words — and it does. A piece of writing can be rewritten, a piece of music can be re-recorded, a piece of film can be re-shot or re-edited. I use this rule in all my workshops. It seems silly, but it matters.

Which brings us to the creator of the piece. You need to remember a few things before you’re ready to hear what someone really thinks of your work:

1. You really do want to know what someone thinks of your work. If you didn’t, you’d have just sent it out or released it on your own without getting feedback. So now you have to take whatever comes back at you.
2. It isn’t personal. You made a thing. That thing is not you. It is of you, but it is not you. If you were a good person before you made that thing, you will be one after. If you were a mess, you will remain a mess. Getting amazing, glowing feedback will not make you whole, nor will getting a list of harsh truths ruin you.
3. Anything you make, you can make better. If you’re making a thing with wood and one piece doesn’t fit right, you can cut a new piece. If the thing looks good but then doesn’t sit right, you can shim it up and add trim so no one sees the shims. If you have ever taken down sheetrock in your home, pulled up flooring, or done nearly any kind of repair work, you have seen someone else’s “drafts” — the shims, the fixes, the improvised solutions. Which brings us to…
4. All that matters is the finished product. Do you want to make a good thing, or just a thing that makes you feel good? If you just want to feel good, then make the thing and keep it to yourself. Really, there’s no shame in that. But if you want to make a thing that other people think is good, it will be because you did the best work you could and listened to the opinions of the smarties  who wanted to help you make it better. In the end, everyone just wants to see something good go out into the world. You’re all on the same team.

None of this is easy. It’s hard to tell someone their stuff isn’t working. It’s awful. And from the creator’s point of view, it’s also pretty awful. This is one reason why I like to pass on the advice I heard somewhere (possibly at a writers’ panel?): Never show your work to someone who has a personal stake in your happiness. They’ll either not be honest with you because they want to protect you, or they’ll be brutal because they resent you.

I’ve given that advice here before, but I don’t know that I fully believe it anymore. For one thing, it can be hard to find people to show your work to, so why not your smart friend or spouse? For another, I think the best critical scenarios occur when both parties are upfront about everything — with each other, and with themselves. I am sometimes great about being told what’s wrong with my work, and I’m sometimes a huge, resentful baby. If it’s the latter, 99% of the time it’s because I didn’t really want to hear it. I wasn’t actually ready to show the work. Either it was a very early draft and the other person’s confirming things I knew in my heart weren’t going to work, or I simply haven’t gotten enough distance from the thing.

You have to be ready. Not only ready to have someone else’s critical eyes on it, but ready to do what it takes to make a thing what it needs to be. There does become a point, or so you hope, where you stop seeing it as an extension of yourself and start seeing it as a thing you would like to be as good as possible. That’s when you want eyes on it.

For the reader, you also have to be aware of your role. Someone asking you to read their 200-page YA comic detective novel is asking you to read it as a YA comic detective novel — not as one of the sprawling Victorian sagas that are more your personal taste. In other words, ask “What is this writer trying to do here, and do they achieve that?” Because while good writing is good writing, there are a lot of types of stories, techniques, devices, etc., that may work well for the story and for the intended audience, even if they don’t work for you.

(Though maybe that’s good advice, too: Don’t show your 200-page YA comic detective novel to your Victorian novel-loving friend, or your David Foster Wallace fetishist.)

Finally, there’s the question that comes up in a lot of workshops: What do I do with the feedback I get? Which means a few things, really. It means: How much of this do I try and incorporate? It can also mean: Do I have to listen equally to everyone?

The answer is, it depends. Which is a frustrating, sucky answer, but that’s the thing: When you receive criticism, and from multiple sources, it becomes your job to decide what to do.

Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes you’ll have a whole room full of people telling you if you make chapter three your chapter one, you’ve fixed every other problem in the book. But more likely, one person has issues with X, while another seems fixated on Y, while another thinks you have a Z problem halfway through. And three other people thought it was basically fine. What then? Who do you listen to?

All of them. Listen to everyone. Hear what they’re really telling you. Then start sorting them into piles. Here go the people who think everything’s just great. Here go the people who seem to hate everything they come across. Those two piles are slightly less helpful, right? So you can probably set them aside. Then here are the people who had issues with quality X in your work. Now you need to take a good, hard look at quality X. Are they right? Did it set off that little alarm in your skull, the one that magically confirms something you weren’t even consciously aware of? (I trust you know what I’m talking about here.) Then okay: What of the suggested fixes might make this thing better?

And so on. Does it ever get easier, knowing what advice/issues to take and what to reject? I don’t know that it does. But there’s a deeper danger in rejecting all of it. We’ve all read books, watched films, heard albums where we thought: They really could’ve used someone else’s hand in this. Remember that the end goal, as if all the other stuff weren’t hard enough, is to make something good, not to make you feel good.

(Note: I’m saying this last line to myself in the mirror right now. New mantra.)

Photo Credit: Hizonic via Compfight cc

Journalist Oliver Willis, writing recently in the Daily Banter, says that conspiracy theories are “the mind’s way of dealing with a world that seems to be turned on its ear.” If you use social media even casually, you’ve had a front-row seat to the flourishing of this condition over the last few years. The twice-daily Lucky Slots invitations from Aunt Pat are one thing, but why is she posting about False Flags and the various Socialist agendas of our President? Was she always like this, or has the semi-anonymity of Facebook freed something dark and weird from within her? 

As a creative type, you can choose to be disturbed by all this, or you can choose to exploit it for the betterment of your work. (And yes, those are almost always your available choices.) Willis’ quote is saying people develop extraordinary beliefs in order to compensate for a world that makes increasingly little sense to them. But look even closer:

It’s not that the world itself doesn’t make sense. It’s that it has ceased to look right within the fragile narrative framework generated by the person viewing it.

Guys, this is fiction gold.

We’re each, as someone once said, the hero of our own story. But as Batman and Don Quixote both remind us, you have to be fairly screwed up to consider yourself a hero. Add to that the fact that everything is wildly beyond our control, and you have what it takes to create good fictional characters.

I’ve said before that characters need to be driven and damaged. In real life, you’re a reasonable person, right? If the light turns red, you stop. If someone says, “Don’t go in there!” you don’t go barging through the door. And since you’ve never been near a bull, you know not to drop everything and pursue your dream of becoming a bullfighter. Good fictional characters do not know this. They don’t stop at red, and the person telling them not to go in there is, in that moment, yet another mortal enemy in a long series of mortal enemies. Good fictional characters are nutjobs.

In other words, like Aunt Pat, your characters have a narrative of their own, one they believe to be true, one they cling to like a rope. One which, were it severed, would cause them to spiral into oblivion. They’re deranged*, in the best possible ways.

Driven and damaged is pretty non-negotiable. Because the demands of living in a fictional narrative are unrealistic and extreme, so must be the sense of self required to function in that narrative. An ordinary person would walk away, or settle. If your fictional character does that, the story ends too early. This doesn’t mean your character is an asshole 24/7, and it doesn’t mean you need to put them in extreme situations all the time. Just “slightly unbelievable” will do.

Most orphans in Victorian England did the best they could, growing up in orphanages and living whatever lives were handed to them, if they managed to make it to adulthood. You do not want to read that book, at least not more than once. You DO want to read Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, because those two monkeys are of a slightly heightened reality, are they not? They’re made not only of sterner stuff, but of weirder stuff. They’re not right in the head, is what I’m saying, and we reap the rewards.

The female characters in The Scarlet Letter and Little Women occupy the same state as each other, both geographically and psychologically. They live in Massachusetts, about a half hour’s drive (car-wise, anyway) down Route 2 from each other, and while they take very different courses in their lives, they’re all just a little more independent and (ugh) “strong-willed” than was permissible or advisable in the eras of their creation. But if they weren’t, there’d be no story for any of them. What’s that bumper sticker? “Well-behaved women seldom make history”? (Note: This is a quote from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing about — ta-da! — Puritan funeral services.) Well, “well-behaved” women never make good fiction.

All this comes down to is understanding what it means to make an “active” character. We’re told all the time characters need to be active, and so you see a lot of student fiction where people smoke and half-talk and then suddenly they’re robbing a liquor store, as though the writer had just remembered, Damn, I forgot to make him active! And while robbing a store (in my pissy straw man example) is certainly an act, what about that character ever felt like this was something they might do? I mean, come on: You read that stuff and if the prose is good, you might feel something like excitement, but what then? You feel cheap and cheated. Welcome to the post-fiction refractory period.

In my twenties, I used to never shut up about the importance of “incident,” by the way, and I could show you a dozen stories where incident is piled on like the possessions in the back of the Beverly Hillbillies’ pickup. Then someone in a writers’ group would say, “Yeah, but this doesn’t feel earned,” and I’d silently pity them.

This is why thinking of characters as “driven and damaged” helps me more than “active.” Active is pretty vague. It’s like telling someone to be healthier. Thanks! I’ll get right on that! Give them specifics, though — hey, try yoga and walking and maybe don’t eat four Trader Joe’s mixed-berry turnovers in an eight-minute span** — and then you’re actually being helpful.

Likewise, driven and damaged does not preclude seemingly passive characters. Look at guys like Lewis Miner in Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land, or Jeff Lebowski in the movie The Big Lebowski: Two slackers who nonetheless work exhaustingly hard to retain their hold on slackerdom. The world around each of them is demanding something, and they resist to a degree which is unrealistic, possibly pathological. But because of that, they are good fictional characters. Also because of that — the world around them demands one thing, they demand another — you have tension, which creates stakes. They have things they care about, even if what they care about most is maintaining the cocoon of not caring about things.

Our job is to figure out both sides of the equation: What does Aunt Pat need the world to look like? And what is the world giving her instead? Then our job is to set some things in motion, playing these two sides against each other. Aunt Pat, tired of getting no “likes” for her angry Facebook comments, decides to do something about it. So she becomes a domestic terrorist. Or she forms a home school and offers it to the parents in her neighborhood. Or she starts a newsletter. Or she sets out for Africa to prove once and for all that Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim Socialist who may also be the literal Antichrist. And she makes it to Kenya. But then…

The “but then…” is your actual story. The first part, whichever route you choose for Aunt Pat, is just your premise. Aunt Pat has ideas. The world seems to contradict this, or to hold final confirmation of her ideas tantalizingly out of reach. That’s a buddy comedy right there, Aunt Pat and The World.

Look at the characters you like in any kind of fiction. Tell me they’re not at least mild nutjobs. Sam Malone, a recovering alcoholic, not only owns the bar he works in, he goes there every day believing this will be the day he’ll get Diane or Rebecca to love him. Despite the fact that he can’t stop sleeping around, and despite the fact that he has zero interest in true self-improvement. Driven and damaged is Sam Malone of Cheers.

Diane Chambers, for her part, is a highly intelligent academic who would seem to have the wherewithal to at least get a job working for a college, if not teaching at one. Or a bookstore, which, in 1980s Boston, was probably not a bad gig. Certainly better than showing up every night for tips at a fairly underpopulated bar where she knows she’ll endure sexual harassment and verbal abuse all night long. But Diane is driven to try and improve the lowlifes around her, while also being damaged enough to feel an abusive family is better than no family at all.

Let’s not even get too far into Cliff Huxtable, a capable obstetrician who nonetheless practices from home, clearly so he can keep an eye on his daughters and drive away their potential male suitors, while encouraging his lone son in his hapless pursuit of girls. Meanwhile, he employs sarcastic and cutting humor with all his children, rarely showing real affection toward them. Rather, he expects them to realize that when he eases up on them, that’s his love. And he maintains a mother-son relationship with his wife, Claire. Cliff Huxtable, in one of the harshest dramas ever televised, is driven to surround himself with a large family, but is too damaged to love them properly.

You can do this all day, believe me. And in this way, your main character certainly is a hero. A hero is, as we know, not the one who goes along to get along. A hero is, of course, The One Who… That’s how we’re able to recognize them. But do know that why they’re The One Who… is because there’s something deeply, wonderfully broken about them. They are deranged. They are nutjobs. They simply can’t accept their world for the way it is, so don’t let them. Instead, turn them loose on your pages.

* I want to be very careful here and explain that I do not mean the insane, i.e., people who are unable to function to one degree or another, who cannot distinguish right from wrong. Nutjobs are people who may otherwise be able to function, who can normally tell right from wrong, yet who lapse into a kind of situational insanity in order to deal with environmental pressures.

** Don’t really say this to me. Just keep out of it.