Because I dabble in writing things, on occasion people will ask me to check their work. When I did this in my fraternity, I quickly learned to establish a couple rules:

1–If you do not know the assignment, I cannot help you.
2–If you cannot explain the assignment, I will not help you.

I adopted these rules because I tried to help out a couple fraternity brothers and it turned out that they didn’t understand the assignment and my help didn’t actually help them and they blamed me. Later, for reasons I don’t remember, I started editing masters theses from Pakistani students who needed help from a native English speaker. This led to a new rule:

3–Rules 1 and 2 are negated by bundles of cash. (Everyone has a price; mine is quite low.)

I bring this up because several years ago a friend asked me to give my opinion on his novel. He emphasized that he intended to publish it. He then handed me 90 pages of text that, to my surprise, turned out to be the entire novel. It also turned out it wasn’t very good.

I then faced a dilemma. How brutal do I get? Is it my job to crush his dream? After all, he’s not a student. I’m paid to break their dreams. On the other hand, I’ve asked friends to look at things for me and been disappointed when their feedback was sparse and/or vague.  In the case of my friend, I found what little I could that was positive and was as honest and supportive as I could be. I also added my usual caveat that if you follow my advice you’re a fool. Your work is yours; if you make it mine you do so at your peril. (Translation: don’t blame me if you muck things up thanks to me. Something like that.)

A couple years later he gave me a revision. I was shocked at how much better it was. He’d dropped most of the potboiler aspects and had changed the point of view. It was still a bit short and he’s prone to flowery prose that draws attention to itself with its verbose radiance and luminosity.

Recently, he gave me third version. He’s brought back the potboiler elements but much more effectively. He still has a ways to go to get it publishable, but he’s getting there and I’m having fun reading them because thus far each has been different. He’s actually been revising the novel by rethinking it and moving parts around, not just proofreading.