“I just don’t understand your character,” the young woman, an assistant editor for an imprint of a major publishing house, told me. She pulled a strand of hair around her ear and adjusted her glasses. She sighed, seemingly having struggled with a great burden and now satisfied with her judgment sat back in her chair and looked across the conference table at me, her expression resolute.
I was polite. Smiled. Felt my cheeks quiver and thanked her for her time. Inside, of course, I fell into a well of inadequacy. I had failed. My writing wasn’t strong enough. I had not made my character understood. Half-heartedly, I asked if she had any ideas as to how I might improve characterization. “Omigod, like, I just can’t put my finger on it, but, you know, I was looking for something amazing.” Arguing was futile. She had read fifteen pages, a “partial,” of my novel, and assessed that whatever happened in the next 300 pages would not give her deeper understanding of my protagonist.
Later, sitting on my back deck in the autumn cool and sipping bourbon, I allowed myself a little rage. Of course she didn’t understand my character, I thought to myself. She’s all of 25 years old. Her prefrontal cortex hasn’t fully matured. Besides, I am writing about a character in the Vietnam War and experiences that occurred thirty-years before she was born. How could she possibly understand—or sympathize with a war-hardened soldier? Her youth worked against her. She had moved from her parents’ home to an Ivy League dormitory room to an apartment in Brooklyn which she shares with three others. She had only seen war in re-runs of M*A*S*H. And yes, war was amazing, and yet her experience, I postulated, had never brought her into the soul-deadening grit of war’s fears and losses. It was not I who was inadequate, but she.
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