The poor guy got slapped around pretty badly, for the mistake of having an opinion some of his readers didn't like. He got it in the comments section and on his Facebook and Twitter pages.

He wrote me a discouraged letter, wanting to know the trick for dealing with it. Here's the note I sent him in case anyone finds it helpful, because almost all of us write sometimes and all of us have to deal with life's trolls.

The answer is not a technique for dealing with abusive critics, but in being a certain kind of person. People, I wrote him, will tell you to develop a thick skin, but that's only partly and misleadingly true. By "thick skin," they often really mean "shell."

Writers with truly thick skins or shells are trolls. Their writing often has a junkyard-dog meanness and a moral ugliness

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