[...] I’d send two or ten or forty pages to my agent, and he’d say the same thing, that none of my characters were likable. I thought of Archer. His characters weren’t likable. He wasn’t likable. I thought of how hard I worked in my stories to be likable to the reader. I remembered a creative writing class I took in college, where the professor, a cynical screenwriter who’d written exactly one movie that got made, told us that when our characters weren’t likable, you could fix it by giving them a clubfoot or a dog. I gave one of the gang members a clubfoot, and my agent wrote in the margin: “WTF?” He told me I had to write something closer to the truth. So I began writing this YA novel a few months ago, the one about my youth, the one that was going nowhere, and I sent him the first tet pages about four months ago but I never heard back. I read the pages again and I saw the problem. My voice only came alive when I was talking about someone else; my ability to see the truth and to extrapolate human emotion based on what I saw and was told didn’t extend to myself.