If Anyone's Going to be an A-hole in Your Book, Let it be You

Writers love to punish through the pen.

It makes sense. When we’ve been wronged, we’re desperate for people to know. We want to be able to share our what happened with people who will listen and be on our side.

And who better to tell than readers? We’re talking to a group of people who are (hopefully) on our side. Keeping all this in mind (as well as the fact there are three sides to every story—your side, their side and the truth), let me share about what happened to me in the past week.

My boyfriend, son and I moved into our new, dream home and in the process, our heretofore lovely relationship with our realtor devolved into a (text) screaming match. It ended with him telling us he had no respect for us and repeatedly saying he couldn’t believe how awful we were being “after all I’ve done for you.”

This was all because he had mistakenly (and repetaedly) told us we were moving on a Tuesday and we only found out about his mistake midday Monday.

The reason the last minute news was a big deal was not only because we had movers scheduled and were ready to get the F out of our house to begin our new adventure but because I’d arranged a trip around our moving date. And when you have a toddler, plans changing at the last minute always makes the volume, in Spinal Tap parlance, go up to 11.

Even though we’d confirmed that Tuesday was the day in every form of writing short of a carrier pigeon, his mistake itself wouldn’t have been a big deal if he’d handled it differently.

See, we kept asking him and his office what time we’d get the keys on Tuesday and his office kept saying they’d check. That Monday, when we emailed and said we really needed to know what time and how we’d be getting the keys the next morning, the realtor’s assistant responded that we’d be getting them on Wednesday. We panicked because of all the aforementioned reasons. Then we saw the email trail she forwarded, which showed she’d only asked the owner’s realtor for the keys that morning. My boyfriend called her, asking what had happened, and she burst into tears, saying she’d screwed up. I grabbed the phone and when I realized she was crying, I told her it was okay, it wasn’t her fault, we’d work it out. Then we called our realtor on his cell.

This was a man who, during the entire process of selling our home and purchasing the new one, picked up on the first ring, ever delighted to hear from us. But his (exorbitant) commissions on the two houses had gone through the week before, and the previously charming, delightful man was replaced by an ogre.

The Ogre said he was busy tending to his other “rolodex” of clients and how dare we think we were the only ones. Also, we’d made his assistant cry and that was not okay with him. I admit that we lashed back at him, saying he’d told us the wrong day and I now had to change my trip and we had to pay the movers to change days and switch childcare and blah blah blah. That’s when he started in on how much he’d done for us and how he had no respect for us.

I texted him screenshots of him confirming that Tuesday would be our move in date and his only response was, “You can stop sending me screenshots.” Furthermore, he explained, everyone knows that when a realtor says you get keys on a certain day, that realtor means 5 pm and he didn’t know he had to explain such a basic thing to us. (I’ve checked with a few realtor friends and turns out that’s not a thing.)

Anyway, it was ugly, made all the uglier when it turned out the previous owners had not moved out when we showed up on Wednesday with our belongings. It was all very surreal—them moving their things out while we were moving ours in—and we’re still finding drawers filled with their mail, boxes of their things and tons of broken items. It was also filthy when we’d been assured by The Ogre that it would be clean.

Can you imagine if, instead of the scene I described, The Ogre had just responded, “Oy, I screwed up. Also, the owners haven’t moved out yet. I know it’s not great but can we just switch your move to the next day?”

Instead, a man whose entire business is based on relationships and reputation lost what would have been a lifelong client (I bought my previous house through him). Also, I know the head of his agency since I interviewed him for an article. And I write for a lot of publications where I could share this experience. I could also pull the trigger at any time on a review for him on any one of the sites where he can be reviewed. His behavior just doesn’t seem like good business.

Now. Do you see how I told that story? He’s a monster, I’m an innocent victim. While at this point in time, I truly believe both of those things, I also know that 1) He was just reacting from fear and that’s something I could have sympathy for, 2) Jim and I could have responded calmly to the situation, since in the scheme of things it’s not a big deal and 3) Because we’ve had a relationship with him for years and he’s always been great before, we could just assume he was having a bad day.

Instead I’m swearing vengeance, fantasizing about conversations with his boss and articles/reviews I could write.

So here’s what I’m getting at: this resentment is fresh and so now would not be the time to write the scene for a book. We’re talking, after all, about something that happened a few days ago. So if I I wanted to include this in a book, I would wait until I’d processed the resentment more. Also, I would show rather than tell by creating the scene rather than telling you about it. But perhaps most importantly, I would let you come to the decision that the realtor is an a-hole without me shoving it down your throat.

Why? Because in the process of trying to garner sympathy, writers become annoying. Somehow, trying to get sympathy gives you the opposite. I guarantee that you’ve read books where the writer was still mad at someone they were writing about and so, while writing about the terrible thing the person did to them, they were filled with righteous self-indignation. And I guarantee that you were turned off. Maybe you didn’t know why you didn’t like the writer but you didn’t.

My point is: process first. Then pen. Paint the person who did the terrible thing or things as a full person, not just an ogre. If I were putting the Real Estate Ogre anecdote in a book, I would show all the lovely things he did before Ogre day, how genuinely happy he was for us when we got the house and how funny he can be. Then, when I wrote the Ogre scene, you’d feel my genuine surprise at his behavior. You’d be on my side because I wouldn’t be working overtime to try to show you how wrong he was and how right I was. I’d also share more less-than-lovely behavior on my part during the interaction, maybe even some of my a-hole responses back to him.

Doing fourth steps in 12-step programs teaches you something it’s hard to forget and it’s oh so useful to know when writing about a-holes: when we’re mad at someone, our egos go into overdrive, trying to convince us of how right we are. In its take-all-prisoners mode, the ego ignores the way we contributed to the situation—it literally erases our bad behavior from our memory. It’s only when forced to write out exactly what happened that we see the part we played. (This isn’t true is, of course, in cases of abuse when someone is truly powerless and an innocent victim.)

My point is this: even though it can feel incredibly satisfying, don’t do what I did here and write a scene while the resentment is still fresh. Instead, work out what really happened and the part you played with a sponsor or therapist or friend. Unless you’re writing about outright abuse at a time when you were fully powerless, keep working on it until you see the part you played.

Then start your writing for the general public. Or don’t wait and bust out with it while you’re still pissed.

But you may risk coming off like the a-hole, which would really suck since it was actually them.

(Speaking of being an a-hole, I would be one if I didn’t mention that the title of this post is a quote attributed to Mary Karr.)