Dear Geist,

In my fiction writing workshop, one person said I should write a lot more about the dad character. Another person said that the dad character is superfluous and I should delete him. Both of these writers are very astute. Help!

Dear Stumped,

Your responsibility as a writer is to receive all input as information, then resolve it in the writing or ignore it. Conflicting information is particularly interesting – sounds like that dad figure has a lot more heat than you realized! But don’t get derailed by advice, conflicting or otherwise. In the words of Neil Gaiman, “When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”