Do You Tell Aunt Mildred?

I have an honest-to-God confession to make. When I go to a cocktail party, I BEG, really and sincerely BEG, my significant other to tell people I am an actuary. I am not 100% sure what an actuary does except it involves numbers and predicting when you are going to drop dead so insurance companies can rate you before giving you life insurance, but it sounds dreadfully yawn-infesting. No offense to any actual actuaries who find their spreadsheets orgasm-inducing.

Why do I do this? I don't want to get stuck in a corner talking to someone who tells me their Great Aunt Mildred has a fabulous book that will be a GUARANTEED best-seller if only I will a) edit it and split the profits, or b) WRITE it for her based on her story idea and split the profits. If this sounds horrifying, it IS. And if you think it's rare, then you are drunk as you're reading this. Once you are a novelist--and have actually sold something people can buy at Barnes and Noble (that's the new question I get asked--self-published or can I really buy it at Barnes and Noble . . .?)--the Aunt Mildred factor comes out of the woodwork. I imagine even if you haven't yet published, if people know you write, the Aunt Mildred factor is alive and well. It happened to me two weeks ago and I cringed.

Okay . . . so in addition to this whole cringe-inducing problem, I have a spiritual faith that requires me to be compassionate. I must, must, MUST be gracious (which is why I pull the actuary routine and try to avoid it altogether). I will often feel compelled to read Aunt Mildred's tome. Now, as an aside, there are people who routinely read this blog who are writers and I HAVE read your stuff because we are online friends and that is different--you're writers pursuing this. YOU are not Aunt Mildred.

So the debate is . . . if Aunt Mildred has written something overrun with the passive voice, with no plot you can see, stilted dialogue, and a lead character who is laughably not grounded in reality . . . typos galore, POV hopping from sentence to sentence, do you tell Aunt Mildred? And, going a step further, if you try to coach Aunt Mildred, and she returns to you with the same horrific mess one month and a rewrite later, and if she reveals she has been taking writing classes at night for ten years (to which you wonder what is she learning), and she LOVES writing, do you let her happily toil, or do you say find a new hobby and stop wasting your time?

I have to say I was hired about ten years ago by a woman doctor who was writing about her family (a sort of Isabel Allende book) and I tried to tell her that it was unpublishable. She was so hostile, and so upset, and though I had been (I felt) gracious and honest, she said I had induced her to take to her bed for twenty-four hours with a migraine. Shoot the messenger, I guess.

The blog readers here--the regulars--run the gambit from brutally honest (you know who you are!) to more pep-talk-oriented. I myself try to honor anyone's commitment to writing. But is it a disservice? I know this is a difficult subject--so I am anxious to hear what everyone says.