The Pecman
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I think I need to clarify. I will be using third-person limited POV throughout the story. At the moment, each chapter is third-person from the perspective of one character. ie. you get to find out what is happening around them.
I don't think a technique that limiting is necessary. I think if you just mainly center on the perspective of one character per scene, you'll be safe.
I found with the one (and so far, the only) 3rd person omniscient story I've written so far, ANGEL, that what worked for me was to stick with showing the inner thoughts of only one person per scene. The moment I tried to get inside somebody else's head, it got very confusing, very quickly. What did work was, you could start a scene in an empty room, revealing the thoughts of one character in that room, then change to another perspective the moment a new character enters. But I quickly realized, you can't switch back once you've gone over to a new character.
The other thing is transitions -- opening the scene and closing the scene, or when a key character enters or leaves the room. That's where you can get a way with this kind of trickery. Once I was aware of the technique, I began noticing how other authors do the same thing. J.K. Rowling is a big one on this in her Harry Potter series. Once you're inside Potter's head, you don't immediately jump inside Dumbledore, or any of the other characters. Makes total sense to me.
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The reason I prefer editing a document that doesn't show the changes that I have made is that I find it difficult to read a document that has all the red-line changes immediately shown.
Luckily for the people for whom I've done some editing and proofing, I consider myself a Word Jedi.
What I do before I send them the corrected copy is, I go through it using the Doc Compare mode, using Accept/Reject, and then eliminate the "unnecessary" changes, like when I altered a word but then changed it back to the way it was originally. This way, they get a very clean copy that only shows the legitimate changes.
It takes more time to do it this way, but I think it ultimately helps the writer more. At a real publishing house, I think the editor wouldn't have time to do an actual rewrite, but would make notations in the margins to indicate sections that he or she felt should be rewritten by the writer, and give them pointers on the direction on which to go.
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Would the 'editing' you perform lean more toward content editing, stylistic editing, proofing, or layout/design editing? Make sure to think about this one!
I edited professionally for five different newsstand magazines for 20 years, and routinely re-wrote all kinds of people. The biggest name was Rex Reed, when he did movie reviews for Video Review magazine in the 1980s. I believe I rewrote about a dozen reviews he did, some drastically, some only a touch-up.
My feeling on editing is, I have two basic levels: a "once-over" where I just make an overall comment every few paragraphs when I'm confused about direction, when something makes no sense, or when I think something is lacking, and then a "line edit" where I dig into every word that's there. Nothing's sacred, and I'll rewrite the living crap out of it if I think something can be said in a better way.
I use MS Word's Track Changes/Compare Documents mode to highlight everything I add or delete to a file, then send it back to the author so they can see and judge what was changed. Then they use the "Accept or Reject Changes" mode to zip through the document and decide if what I did should be kept. I'll fight an author up to a point if he wants to throw away a really strong suggestion, but I'd say more than half of my suggestions amount to judgement calls (like the spelling of "judgement") and matters of style & taste. I'm also a stickler on making dialog natural, like a snapshot of the way real people actually speak, and I insist that authors find a way to carve their characters out in a way that makes each of them very distinct from the other.
I'm also a raving lunatic about insisting on maintaining the internal logic of the plot throughout the story. Nothing makes me madder than when a story suddenly takes a bizarre turn, and something is either unbelievable, makes no sense, or otherwise veers in a totally implausible direction. I also do everything I can to make sure the author realizes there has to be a solid reason for the existance of every chapter. If you can drop a chapter from a story and still have it make sense, then chances are, that chapter is just treading water. And I think keeping the conflict and drama as high as possible is a necessary ingredient for any good story.
I've actually done some editing for a few published authors, including my friend Mark Roeder, for whom I did some pinch-hitting for his books The Soccer Field Is Empty and Keeper of Secrets (which he acknowledges in his intro). In the case of the former, I like to think I improved on his original ending, and added a key element that he hadn't thought of that I felt made the finale much more poignant. The rest were stylistic things, mainly adding and enhancing some description where I felt things could be more visual, and cleaning up some language. I was gratified to see that both books got the best reviews he's received, out of the dozen or so he's published.
Keeper of Secrets indirectly inspired the book I'm about to write now. In Roeder's novel, the ghosts of two murdered gay teenagers from the late 1800s help some contemporary teens solve a mystery. I told Mark I felt there was probably a more interesting story in the tale of the two teens -- whom we get to know through a series of diaries found buried in the walls of an old house -- but he responded he felt it would be horrendously complicated and time-consuming to do the historical research to do that kind of story justice.
I finally elected to tell the story of a gay contemporary teen who winds up falling in love with another kid 100 years ago, and their adventures together at the end of the Civil War. Mark was right: the idea has taken an unbelievable amount of research, but I'm now itching to get started, so maybe we can actually start seeing some chapters on this thing in the next few weeks.
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Pec, don't you find that the more you talk about a story, the further it recedes into the distance? I haven't been writing as long as you have but I've found that's true for me. I accidentally killed (or at least temporarily banished to my Unfinished File) a number of what seemed to me promising stories because I chatted about them to the Dude or someone before getting more than a few pages down.
While part of my reluctance to work on the story can be chalked down to semi-Writers' Block, the reality is that I'm overwhelmed with projects at the moment. Working an average of 72 hours a week at my day job hasn't helped matters.
I agree, though, that over-working or over-thinking out a story can kill it before it's written. That almost happened to me with Jagged Angel, in that I dilligently plotted out the entire thing in advance, then sat down to write it. Unfortunately, I discovered that doing all that preliminary work had taken a lot of the fun -- the joy of discovering -- in the actual writing. That made writing some of it quite tedious. But I was eventually able to overcome it.
In this case, I'm just reading some historical books about Lincoln and Sam Clemens (and Jesse James, all of whom figure in the story), and will file that away as background material. When I'm finally in the mood to jump in, I'm confident that I'll be able to do it.
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I had accidentally put the truck in reverse. The open drivers door knocked me down and the left front tire rolled over my right calf.
I never had a car try to kill me before, but I once parked my old VW at a bookstore in Tampa, then had it roll right out into a big highway and block the road! You can be sure I never forgot the emergency brake from then on. Thank de lawd the stupid car didn't hit anybody.
And (back to the meat story), I've heard from several friends who managed to leave portable laptop computers on the hood or sitting on the trunk of their cars, then they drove away, while the computer slid off and hit the road at about 30 miles per hour. One guy actually rolled over the computer, then later brought it to me to see if I could get it fixed! Yeeesh...
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I am assuming you mean a bookshelf of reference books on the mid-1800's. Is the setting of the story America, Canada, Europe or elsewhere?
United States from the fall of 1864 to the spring of 1865, all the way from Missouri to Arizona to Nevada, then cross-country back to Washington, D.C. and then Missouri again, probably by rail.
It turns out that Writers Digest has an entire series of books on Everyday Life in different eras. That's provided many of the answers I was looking for, as far as the 1800s go, but it's still daunting to write about a world that is so foreign to where (and when) we are now. Sam Clemens own books (like the classic Roughing It) fill in some more blanks, as do some others that I've picked up recently.
The key for me is to figure out a way to avoid letting the story become a broken record, endlessly repeating variations of "gee, things are a lot different in 1865 than they were in 2006." That's a tough dramatic hurdle, and I'm not satisfied with the solutions to overcome it yet.
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Many of my characters are composites of real people I know. Or in the case of one character, it's almost me.
I don't think it's possible to write any other way. I think any character a writer creates is going to share some traits with his (or her) creator, or at least someone we know closely. It's not unlike an actor having the ability to momentarily bury their personality and become a totally different person on-stage. Only we do it with a pen (or a word processor).
The best way to make a real character is to write what you know.Yeah, that's an old chestnut, but the reality is, there's always room for us to know more. I knew absolutely zip about karate, prison life, or football when I started writing Angel, but I did weeks of research so that I learned enough about them to the point that I could write about them in a convincing and vivid way. I still can't throw a pass or execute a roundhouse kick, nor have I ever been inside a prison cell (except for a tourist visit to Alcatraz), but the reader will at least believe what happens in the story.
I'm still doing research on my time-travel novel, which continues to be stalled. Part of the reason is that I'm terrified of starting to write before I'm really ready, and trying to capture the verisimilitude of everyday life in 1865 is a daunting task. For example, I don't want somebody to point out -- "hey, dip-shit! There were no such things as shoelaces in 1865, yet you describe somebody tying up their shoes!" Getting the language right is difficult, too. Little things like that will kill ya, every time.
I have a whole bookshelf of mid-1800's reference books -- including several on Sam Clemens -- to help me capture the spirit of that era. The point is, yeah, you have to write what you know... but what you know can have an almost unlimited potential. I know a lot more now than I did ten years ago, that's for sure.
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What makes a character great is the ability to change and grow, to learn from mistakes--just like real people.
I think AJ has hit closest to the truth here. To me, the thing that makes characters memorable is often their flaws, and how they ultimately overcome them (or not). I didn't realize this until halfway through writing Angel, but I felt it applied to not only what I was writing, but also many other favorite stories I've read in the past.
The other thing I look for in a story is how the characters change from the beginning to the end. I look to see what they've learned from their experience, if they're better or worse, and if maybe they won't make the same mistakes again.
My buddy Keith Morrisette has noted before that a big turn-off for him are characters in gay fiction that are "too perfect," who are always understanding, never temperamental, and never make mistakes. To me, he's 100% right. I think characters with flaws make them more human, provided the flaws are believable and work with the plot.
I also agree with AJ's assessment of David Buffet's work. Many (if not all) of the characters in his stories meet the above guidelines. Buffet also tends to make some of his characters fairly complex in that you think of them one way at the beginning, then they become something very different by the end. The characterizations are part of the reason I enjoy reading his work.
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Very good story, or at least a very good start to one. I'd definitely nominate this guy for the "Best Off-Nifty" list, for sure.
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I'll agree to look over the drafts and make some suggestions, though I'm too swamped to do a line-by-line edit. Talk to me in email at thepecman@yahoo.com.
Always glad to help. I have a close friend who has all the symptoms of A.S., but won't go see a doctor to get it checked out. He's now refusing to go out in public places, and my partner and I have to go by and bring the guy groceries every week or two. Very strange (and sad) case, but unfortunately, you can only help people who want to be helped.
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When it comes to meat, you can never be too careful.
:twisted:
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I guess we'll just have to find a bunch of rich, independent, professional, twinks.
But can they act? :D
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Have you ever thought to pitch it to some of those actors who work to scale on movies they feel are worthy?
I come in contact with very, very few actors in my post-production work. (But then there's my Faye Dunaway story, which I'll omit for now...)
Because more than half of the lead actors in Angel would have to be under 18, I think it would be almost impossible to cast. You might possibly be able to get 18 year-olds that "looked" younger, but again, it's a money and reality thing more than anything else. (This is basically what they did for the recent film Mysterious Skin, but it was a very small independent film that I suspect got booked into under 100 theaters.)
If I won the MegaMillions Lotto, of course there'd be no problem! :roll:
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Hey, thanks for the accolades! As I revealed at my afterword, I was inspired to write this story after reading Roman Genesis' novel Earth, as It Is in Heaven. This was the story of a psychologically-disturbed younger teen who falls in love with an slightly-older high school athlete, with tragic results. The story had a lot of bizarre twists and flaws -- chief among them when you find out halfway through that the younger kid has an evil twin (gag!), and the kid winds up killing himself after he finds out that the evil twin has seduced his boyfriend, the football player. The story was ultimately depressing, and nobody is redeemed, everybody suffers.
After reading it, I wrote the author and told him, "you know, the core of your idea was good, but you totally threw me with the evil twin thing and the horrendously-downbeat ending." I asked him for permission to write a completely different story -- one that was totally about the football player and not the disturbed kid, which I found was a much more intriguing point of view -- and came up with a vastly different story. It's a mystery, but it's also a coming-out story with some fairly startling (I hope) twists, and redemption for at least the main character. And no evil twin.
More importantly, I wanted to show how a kid like Dylan could start as one kind of character -- a whiney, obnoxious, spoiled wimpy kid who winds up as a well-built (albeit insecure), popular athlete, and then at the end of the story, finally becomes a well-rounded guy who finally accepts what he is. Only at the end does he become a real person that we actually can admire. I struggled with the problem of writing a character who was essentially unlikeable for the first half of the book, and you only really start to feel sorry for him when his life starts going down the drain.
I particularly enjoyed writing the jail sections of the novel, which required weeks of research. In fact, the whole story was a challenge for me, since it was about people I've never known (rich teenagers in contemporary LA), living in a world I know nothing about (high school athletics). Virtually all of the hundreds and hundreds of teenage readers who sent in comments told me I nailed high school life pretty well, and a few were shocked that I was in my late 40s. A handful of readers told me that they felt that they were very well-accepted in their own schools, but agreed that they knew of very few (if any) high school athletes who'd been able to come out without incident.
Because I've worked in Hollywood for so long, on about 40 different (mostly bad) sitcoms and a dozen episodic dramas, I can't help but write in a way that sorta/kinda feels like a movie. I could see a lot of the events of Angel unfolding as a feature film, and apparently, so could other people. A producer/friend of mine on the East coast did option Angel as an independent film, so I've technically made some (very small) money on it. But I still strongly doubt it can ever be produced.
It's very ironic to me that, after working in TV and film for so long, the two novels I've written (Groovy and Angel) are prime examples of stories that could probably never be made into films! The subject matter would send studio execs running out of the room, and there's no way we could even get away with an R rating. Still, I understand that there are ideas and concepts that work well as movies and as novels, but some only fit one category.
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Hey, sincere congrats, Blue! Trust me, you'll feel better for it.
Nobody can come out until they're ready. I know a married guy who finally divorced his wife and came out in his FIFTIES! (He's a major executive VP at Paramount Pictures, believe it or not, and his longtime companion is his assistant.)
Hope things work out for you. You might want to look into local support groups, clubs, and other stuff, just to find ways of meeting people -- assuming you want to avoid the usual bar scene and so on. I like to think there's a soulmate for everybody in the world (maybe more than one!), and I hope you can eventually find somebody that you're compatible with.
More importantly, maybe you can also find some solid gay friends to hang around with. I've got maybe a dozen gay friends in our inner circle, and our bonds go a lot deeper than just sex. Hell, it's all about the "everything else" -- nothing about the sex at all. But just having guys (and a couple of gay ladies) to hang out with and talk to is nice. If nothing else, we can rant and rave against our California governator out here...
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YES- young adolescents are quite capable of forming intense bonds and experiencing the associated emotions. For heterosexual youth, this is considered a rite of passage.
Well, everybody's kinda ignoring the main part of my critique, which was I don't buy the conflict that Dewey is throwing into the story. I think parts of the story are entertaining and well-written, which makes this problem all the more frustrating. It's like watching an otherwise good movie, and then it suddenly veers off into something silly or unbelievable, and you wind up throwing your popcorn cup at the screen.
What I'll say about teenage emotion is this: I believe that in a lot of ways, the first time you fall in love is, for many people, the most intense experience of your life. And I'd also agree that there's nothing more pure and more heartfelt than love at that age. I know it was for me, and I think some of that is reflected in my writing.
That having been said, you gotta read the Brian & Pete story to really see the problems the author as set up. To me, the story has taken some bizarre twists, and I also think the story ran outta steam a long time ago -- like a TV show that's gone about two seasons too long.
So I guess my main point was: I find it hard to believe that two 13 year-old kids could go through the emotional malestrom shown in the story. It's just too much. I'm all for suspending my disbelief, but it only goes so far.
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I think the same rule should apply to creative writing. "Said" is unobtrusive, like "the," or "and," or "then." Attention is not drawn from what is said.
I agree to a point. But I think it's also fair to occasionally stir things up by having characters explode, yell, bellow, whisper, mutter, or otherwise recite dialog in a different way. I think this is particularly important when the emotions of one or more of the characters radically change, to show that there's something important has happened.
However: like adverbs, I think alternating forms of "said" has to be done carefully and not willy-nilly. And sometimes, omitting "he said" works, too, with just the bare dialog alone, as long as it's clear which characters are speaking.
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I believe you mean 'tyranny'.
I'm a victim of malfunctioning cut & paste!
Yeah, I ran that through the dictionary just to be sure, but pasted the wrong word back. Mea culpa!
Never underestimate the value of good editing...
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You're confusing categories. An adverb is a category of speech or grammar, action isn't.
Where I come from, an Adverb is a simply word that modifies a verb. That's all. Nothing more or less than that. (I just checked, and funny enough, the dictionary says the same thing.)
I don't consider an Adverb to be a category of anything. "Action," however, is a category, by the loose definition that it's a type of writing or a situation. You have an "action scene" or "action dialog," each describing a situation where something is being propelled forward at a faster-than-normal rate, maybe to heighten tension or suspense. But that's a pedantic argument beyond the original point, which is simply that many amateur writers use too many adverbs and adjectives.
Long live adverbs! Up with sighing and warbling! Down with the tyrrany of style manuals!Let's agree to disagree. I think there's a way to use style manuals in a way that can make writing better, but at the same time, I'm the last guy to say you must adhere to them 100% of the time, for every situation. Sometimes, rules are made to be broken. But I also think it's a very good idea to know the rules first before you break them.
And by the way: the word is "tyranny."
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I wonder if you'd care to expand a bit on what makes for "literary" quality in general, and also how it applies specifically to Buffet's work, "Alpha Male" in particular.
Well, to me, what you're asking for is kind of like saying:
"I understand that chocolate ice cream is your favorite. What is it about chocolate ice cream specifically that you like? How does it differ from other ice creams? Is there something they lack that chocolate has? Is there something that makes you more compatible with chocolate ice cream, and vice-versa?"
It kinda turns into a Monty Python sketch at some point.
I don't have the time to sit down and write a 2000-word essay (especially for free) on why I liked the story. I can simply say, as I finished reading each chapter, I thought, "jesus, this guy blows me away at how good his stuff is!", and I couldn't wait to jump in and read more. His writing was visual enough that I could easily imagine this as a film -- though, because of the subject matter, it would be nearly impossible to do commercially -- and I thought the characters were striking, memorable, and lacked a lot of the cliches I see in similar work.
I thought Buffet's ability to describe complex moods, multi-level emotional exchanges, and yet constantly push the story forward was something I found compelling and engaging. If you read my Gay Writing Tips piece, I'd go a step further and say Buffet did everything right, down the line. I'm not even into the kind of sex (the dominant/submissive role-playing thing) Buffet writes about, but all of the surrounding story made reading the story an exceptional experience for me. I've read it two or three times, which is something I rarely do, particularly with Net fiction.
So I'd just leave it at that. (And for the record, I actually prefer chocolate-chip to chocolate.)
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Would you like to expand on that? What it is you like about this story?
I think the quality of Buffet's writing is head and shoulders above almost anything I've ever seen in amateur online fiction. He's one of the few guys I know who I feel has actually achieved a real "literary" quality in his work, without any of the affectations or attitude.
I also think Buffet has exactly the right balance in juggling all the elements that make up a good story: terrific description (the prose), cutting-edge dialog, and the ability to make each character distinct and different. I also think he does a great job in balancing the erotic content with the actual plot, where neither overshadows the other.
Buffet also fulfills the #1 rule I stress all the time around here: his work is never boring, and he always makes you want to read more. His characters and plotlines are constantly surprising, and provide a lot of complex, subtle nuances that blow me away every time I read them. Alpha Male moves along at a fairly brisk pace, and every chapter adds more pieces to the puzzle, and also reveals many details about the characters, some of whom change very much by the time the story ends.
Read Alpha Male yourself and see if you agree. You'll find it on Nifty:
http://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/college/alpha-male/
Buffet's follow-up, "Master Beta," wasn't quite as good, and I think even he agreed and threw in the towel on it. I think there's still a good sequel that could be written, but it'll be up to him to finish it.
To me, Buffet is one of the few Net writers I've read whose work could do well if published commercially. I've encouraged him in emails to get his work out to agents and the various publishing houses, but as far as I know, it hasn't happened yet. And that's a pity, because I think his work is on a level with many other "name" writers in gay fiction, ranging from John Rechy to Patricia Warren to Armistead Maupin.
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Yes, even a very neutral word like 'said' can be overused... though he's wildly successful commercially, one of the things that drives me barking mad about Michael Crichton's work is that he attributes nearly every line of dialogue.
I agree, Crichton is a frustrating writer to observe. I think he's capable of some really good work, and then once in awhile he goes and writes dull, ponderous crap that gets bad reviews and modest sales. His new one (the one that rakes environmentalists over the coals) isn't doing too well.
I think there's a way to subconciously attribute dialog in context, and make it clear who's talking in a scene just by what's said and how it's said. I discovered when writing Angel that the trick is when you have a scene with more than two or three people. Then, you wind up having to attribute at least the new person speaking, then make it clear what's happening as the dialog bounces around, almost like a multi-player ping-pong match.
The other way to do it is find a way to distinguish the way each character speaks and make them express themselves differently. You can do this with accents, choice of words, attitudes... there's a treasure-trove of tricks to choose from. Once you do that, you can bop back and forth between at least three or four people, and not necessarily have to attribute every sentence. I personally like to avoid attribution, and instead express it with attitude. For example, one character glares at the other, or points to him, then the dialog follows. No "he spat," no "he exploded," not even "he said." Just the dialog can work, as long as it's crystal-clear who's saying what.
On the other hand: "he said" can be a beautiful, simple phrase that works. Not everything has to be fancy or profound. Sometimes, simple is best. Look at Ernest Hemingway's work; there's some beautifully-written stuff there. There's a way to balance doing it too much, and doing it poorly.
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I use adverbs... so take me out and hang me in the town square as an example of what NOT to do!
I don't think we're saying never use adverbs. It's more a question of knowing when to use them, and when to avoid them -- particularly when you're using them as a crutch to prop up a weak sentence or problematic dialog.
Look at the work of your favorite authors, and note how they use adverbs and other modifiers. Stephen King swears that when he rewrites and edits one of his own 1st draft manuscripts, a lot of what he cuts out are unnecessary adverbs and adjectives.
So it's a question of moderation, that's all. Try to avoid excessively using adverbs and adjectives. [Oops -- there's an adverb right there!]
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My story is a lot less dramatic than the ones above. (And my sympathies to you guys -- Jesus, some of you have the makings of a fairly dramatic novel just in your real-life tales!)
I had been mulling over whether I was gay for several years. I knew I was different as a little kid, but I didn't really have a name for it until I hit adolescence, around 11. By my late teens, I had gone out with a half-dozen girls, but had also fooled around with some male friends in Jr. High and High School. I'd held back from going all the way, just due to fear and uncertainty -- I guess the fear of being found out at school, being ostracized, and so on.
By my early 20s, I had pretty much realized that how I felt wasn't going away. I knew about the gay bars here in LA, and in fact lived in a neighborhood less than three blocks from a whole slew of them, but hadn't had the courage to actually walk into one. Finally in early 1982 -- on Valentine's Day, as a matter of fact -- I saw the movie Making Love with a couple of gay friends. Seeing the movie made something click inside me, and I finally realized I didn't have to change who I was to accept being gay. I know it sounds crazy, but up to that point, I somehow subconciously thought I'd have to act differently if I was gay, like I'd have to turn into some kind of lisping, cross-dressing queen, which is not my thing at all. The main guys in that movie were fairly macho and very attractive, and somehow, that helped get it through my head that all I had to do was to just accept it and let it happen. I immediately felt a huge sense of relief, like a 500-pound weight left my shoulders.
I screwed up my courage and confided in my friends as we left the theater, and one of them whooped out, "I KNEW IT! I WON THE BET!" So they had known all along that I had been struggling with this thing, and helped me through the whole thing over the next few months. I came out a few days later to my brother and sister and a few friends, but I left everybody else on a "don't ask, don't tell" basis. My take on it was, I'm not gonna go out of my way to shove my gay identity in somebody's face, but if they ask me, I'm not gonna lie about it, either. I figured being gay was just one facet of me, and wasn't necessarily the core of what and who I was. (And yet at the same time, I can't imagine not being gay; if I had my life to live over again, I'm not sure I'd change that at all, though I have to admit, I think the world is a lot less hostile to straight people.)
Anyway, I met a guy about a year later, another writer (working for a rival magazine), we hit it off, and we hooked up. We're still together after more than 20 years, and that's longer than most straight couples we know. He's far more closeted than I am, but he came from a fairly conservative family up in Canada. And even he's loosened up a little bit over the years.
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Hey: all you 'editors' out there!
in Editor's Desk
Posted
Man, ain't that the truth! I have some horrendous gaffes that I occasionally repeat in my chapters, and my good buddy Keith Morrisette slaps me silly on them. One of them is when I have characters *wincing* or rolling their eyes. :roll: He allows me maybe one of those per chapter, but no more.
Keith's got his share of pecadillos, too, but I'll take the fifth on revealing them, since he's not here to defend himself. I think the bottom line is that it's good to get a nonpartisan 3rd party to read early drafts of what you write -- somebody you trust and respect -- and can give you feedback and tough criticism. You go into this as a partnership, knowing that they're not insulting you with their opinions, they're just trying to make the story better.
Every time I've done this, some of my toughest critics have forced me to make choices that ultimately made the work better. In some cases, I wound up not going in the direction they advised me, but also veering away from my original approach, coming up with a third method that was arguably better still. So it's all worth it in the end.