Here are some suggestions about how to deal with the trolls

The poor guy got slapped around pretty badly, for the mistake of having an opinion some of his readers didn’t like.

- David Mills, Tribune News Service

He got it in the comments section and he got it on his Facebook and Twitter pages. He wrote me a discouraged letter. He wanted to know the trick for dealing with it. Here’s the note I sent him, a little revised, in case anyone finds it helpful, because almost all of us write sometimes and all of us have to deal with life's trolls. Basically, I think the answer is not a technique for dealing with hostile and abusive critics, but in being a certain kind of person, which isn’t the kind of person most people tell you to be.

People, I wrote him, will tell you to develop a thick skin and that's true, but only partly and misleadingly true. By “thick skin,” they often really mean “shell.” The writers with truly thick skins or shells we call “trolls.” Their writing often has a junkyard dog meanness and a moral ugliness to it that reflects how little others’ opinions matter to them. They're all in for one side, and usually the simplest version of that side, and they're in to win, for total victory, and they want to cause as much damage as possible in the fight. And they lie like a rug.