My Two Guiding Principles For Giving Notes

I have many writer friends and colleagues who have gotten a lot of notes on their projects. Often, they’ll complain about the notes they’ve been given for one reason or another. A common complaint is that the reader just didn’t like or understand their material. This certainly can happen. Feedback is subjective. Even the most professional reader will sometimes allow personal taste and biases to leak into their evaluations. But I believe there’s a bigger, more foundational mistake that many note givers make, which is misunderstanding their objective when giving feedback.

Over the course of the last ten years of giving notes, I’ve developed two guiding principles that have become foundational to how I approach this task.

1 - Story notes should not be purely critical.

You’re reading a creative work, not grading a test and marking wrong answers. It’s not helpful to point out wrong turns in a script without suggesting an alternative route. That’s why, whenever I address an issue, I give my reasoning and suggest a potential fix. I say ‘suggest’, because I don’t believe in giving prescriptions to writers, no matter how certain I might be that my idea will save their script. This is because it’s THEIR script, not mine. So I’ll say things like “this might work better if” or “it may make more sense if XYZ.” If your notes are all about what’s not working, you’ve failed that writer. Which leads into my next guiding principle:

2 - The purpose is to inspire

A notes session should end with the writer feeling inspired and excited to get back to work, not discouraged by piles of negative comments. I’ve read plenty of scripts that are terrible from start to finish - ones where I struggle to find a single positive thing to say - but I still keep my eyes on the goal of helping the writer to feel inspired. In those tough cases, I find it helps to start by asking a lot of questions, such as:

“Why is this story important to you? What are you trying to say with it?”

“Why have you spent so much of your free time writing THIS story instead of a dozen others?”

“What’s the most interesting part of this story to you? Is there a character, premise, or individual scene that keeps you up at night?”

With these questions, I’m trying to identify where the writer’s passion is coming from. Most scripts are begun with a spark of passion, but the writers take the story in the wrong direction. They’ll either tell it from the wrong character’s perspective, get wrapped up in a complicated plot and forget about the characters, or lose focus for one reason or another. But there’s always something so exciting about the story that it compelled them to sit down and write it. Your job is to figure out what that is and ensure that it’s actually present in the script as the foundation. Once that’s established, then you can work with the writer to scaffold the characters, plot, and theme around that foundation. This ensures they’re telling the story they set out to tell - the one they’re excited about - and that it’s the best version of that story.

By the way, you still can and should be critical when its warranted. You can be honest if the characters are forgettable and the dialogue is cringy.  You can even communicate to a writer that their script is irredeemable. But remember, anyone can tear something apart. Part of the skill of giving notes comes from employing empathy, diplomacy, and tact. Make sure you show the writer that you see what they were trying to do. Validate their efforts. Let them know that you understand why this story was important for them to tell and reassure them that the notes that you’re about to give them come from a place of helping them achieve their vision. 

You can’t control how a writer will react to getting feedback. You can’t make them listen to you. All you can do is ensure that you deliver, with professionalism, the best feedback you’re capable of giving.