Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life—wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean. Aren’t you? I ask.

If you realize that you have done this, you need to stop and look at your characters again. You’ve got to go into these people, and since you don’t know them, this means that you need to go into you, wonderful you, who has so many problems and idiosyncrasies—you, who will be able to figure out what is true for these people and hence, what they would or would not do in a given situation.

If your deepest beliefs drive your writing, they will not only keep your work from being contrived but will help you discover what drives your characters. You may find some really good people beneath the packaging and posing—people whom we, your readers, will like, whose company we will rejoice in. We like certain characters because they are good or decent—they internalize some decency in the world that makes them able to take a risk or make a sacrifice for someone else. They let us see that there is in fact some sort of moral compass still at work here, and that we, too, could travel by this compass if we so choose.

So the acknowledgment that in the midst of ourselves there is still a good part that hasn’t been corrupted and destroyed, that we can tap into and reclaim, is most reassuring. When a more or less ordinary character, someone who is both kind and self-serving, somehow finds that place within where he or she is still capable of courage and goodness, we get to see something true that we long for. This is what helps us connect with your characters and with your book. This is what makes it a book we will foist on our friends, a book we will remember, that will accompany us through life.

When someone reliable gives you this kind of feedback, you now have some true sense of your work’s effect on people, and you may now know how to approach your final draft. If you are getting ready to send your work to a potential agent for the first time, you don’t want to risk burning that bridge by sending something that’s just not ready.