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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mikaela Barree" data-source="post: 6352962" data-attributes="member: 6748861">To answer the original post, this is something I wrestle with. There are a lot of brilliant creators who are horrible or just jerky people in their day to day lives. I often remember the story about Thoreau. The only one who gave a damn about him was Emerson, because Thoreau was known as a lazy jerk to everyone around him. Emerson spoke at his funeral, which was sparsely attended.Then on the other end of the scale are creators like Lovecraft, Polanski, Card, etc. etc..I can sometimes separate the artist from their creation - to say that they had a brilliant mind and were excellent creators, but not people I'd likely be friends with or even support.In other cases, I feel like their bad behavior colors my opinion of the creation too much for me to be an empirical critic, or to enjoy their work; I don't want to support that behavior even incidentally.As a rule in my own life, during workshops and meetings with other creators, I try to keep an eye more to the work than the person. In college, a woman I was attending with usually picked on me and was very negative toward my own work. One time, she made me cry. That same day, we were workshopping her piece and the professor had some negative and in my mind ungrounded things to say about her work - I was outspoken in defending the piece and how much I liked it, because, irrespective of my relationship with the creator, I thought it was a very good piece of writing. Needless to say, she was very surprised, and later apologized for being rude to me. We struck up a friendship a few years down the road.</blockquote>

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