The Equally Lost Art of Receiving Notes

Somebody once asked me if coming up with all the lines my characters say was the hardest part of being a writer. I can say in all honesty, that probably doesn’t even crack the top ten. Easily ahead of that are: constantly tripping over the sacks of money at my place, being hounded by adoring fans when I’m just trying to have a quiet dinner with friends, and always being lauded as the voice of my generation.

Okay, those may or may not be true. Here’s one that actually is – the hardest part of being a writer is learning how to take creative notes and feedback. I have seen more than a few professional writing careers stall because of a complete inability to process feedback and turn it into a stronger next draft.

The biggest challenge lies in determining what notes you should take and which ones you should discard. If you ignore everything, you’re not going to have a long career in situations where you are in a collaborative creative environment. But if you accept and make changes based on every single note you receive, you’ll lose your own voice and the piece will be a creative disaster.

Consider the following two cases:

When The Walking Dead was being pitched to various networks, NBC wanted to put it on the air with one caveat – they wanted to make it a procedural where lawman Rick Grimes solves a Zombie-related crime each week. Any fan of the show knows that the executive who wanted to take this path needs to “look at the flowers.” 

Then there is the well documented saga of M Night Shamalan’s Lady In Water where the executives at Disney begged him to make changes to clarify the story because they were afraid the script he wanted to shoot would confuse and disappoint audiences. He stuck to his guns and the result was a creative and box office disaster that practically drove him out of Hollywood completely.

So when you receive notes on your writing, how do you know if they are NBC Walking Dead idiotic suggestions or Disney Lady in Water lifelines? This is the question that has tormented writers from the first time a Neanderthal looked at a cave wall and said “I’m liking the Woolly Mammoth motif but is there a way we can skew to a younger demographic?”

There are no easy answers to filtering and processing feedback however, here are some things to consider to help you with this difficult task.

Be of open mind and heart

Receiving feedback on your writing is a difficult process for everyone no matter how long you’ve been doing it or at what level. And it is very natural for any emerging writer to not want to hear a critique on something they have poured their heart and soul into. But sadly, opting out is not an option. You will receive feedback throughout your writing career and you need to approach the process with an open heart and mind.

This means when you give someone that first draft of your short story, screenplay, TV pilot, or novel for feedback, be prepared to hear both the good and the bad. As obvious as this seems, too often when a new writer says they want “honest feedback” what they are really saying is “I need you tell me how great this is.” So when any critical feedback is given, it is often met with anger, frustration, or disinterest. Of course you want to be told your writing is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (apologies to Dave Eggers) the first time out. But trust me, it’s not. Writing is rewriting so if the only response you will accept is ego-stroking praise, you’re in for a world of disappointment. More importantly, you won’t be in a mindset to take that critique and use it to make the work stronger the next time around.

Consider the source

Another defence mechanism against accepting feedback is to show it to family, friends, or pets, basically anyone who is almost guaranteed to give raving reviews. Then when presented with contradictory feedback from a neutral source, they’ll say defensively “Yeah, well I showed it to my best friend Jenny and she thought it was brilliant.” Jenny has to tell you she thinks it’s brilliant, it’s a requirement of being a BFF so you can’t take her word as Gospel.

On the other hand, if the feedback is coming from an editor, publishing company, literary agent, story editor or anyone else who appraises stories as a living, you might want to consider what they have to say even if you might not like it. And if more than one source says the same thing, give what they say serious consideration.

One flaw I see in a lot of early writing is a lack of clarity. Usually what happens is newbie writers forget that the reader doesn’t have all the information the writer has in their head and so when they try to tease the reader with dribs and drabs of information, all they end up doing is confusing the reader. When I point out the fact that I was confused and I’m afraid the other readers will be as well, they will point to an obscure mention on page three and say “That explains everything so they shouldn’t be confused.”

If there is ever a disagreement over clarity between the writer and the reader, the reader is almost always right. Trust those giving you feedback because there will be many times you are too close to the material to be objective.

Give yourself a cooling off period

The best technique to process difficult notes is one I had to learn the hard way. I had a feature film project in development with a national funding agency and we were getting notes on our application package to go from the first to second round of development. We received notes from the third party reader and when I first saw them, I was apoplectic. They were not very positive and pointed out a lot of structural and thematic holes in the project. So I reacted like any other professional would – I hit the roof.

I showed colleagues the notes and went through them one by one pointing out how the reader completely missed the point and was bringing their own personal agenda to their evaluation. I couldn’t believe how off the mark a so-called professional reader could be.

Jump ahead a week. I decided to give the notes one more look over just so I could once again revel in how right I was. Except, upon a second read, something strange was happening. As I read them I started thinking things like, “Well I guess they have a point there” and “Yeah, I suppose I hadn’t considered that.” I read them yet again a month later and, after an even longer cooling off period, I could see the merit in what was being said.

Here’s the valuable lesson I learned from that experience – notes that incite anger have some merit to them. Because if they were truly off the mark, we wouldn’t care. But when confronted with notes that contain inconvenient truths, we writers protect ourselves by using anger to shield us from those truths.

So I suggest that when you are faced with notes that turn you from Bruce Banner to full blown Hulk, go with it. Yell, scream, throw things around the room. Tell all your friends how wrong they are. Then, with that out of your system and a full two week cooling period behind you, look at them again.

Detach and look for ways to make it better

Last week I wrote about leading with the positive when giving notes however, there will be times when you won’t have this positive experience. Instead, the notes you receive will be very negative. When this happens the first thing you need to do is to remember, the notes are not about you personally, they are about the work.

A good friend and fellow writer recently had an experience where a client in a corporate writing situation responded to her first pass at the assigned work with a panicked “Dear God, what did you do? This is all wrong.” Despite the fact my friend is an incredibly gifted writer who has been doing this professionally for 25 years now, it still shook her to the core. However, she composed herself, probed for deeper analysis and discovered that the problem lied in the fact that the client failed to give proper instructions for what she wanted. With this new information, she was easily able to deliver something more in line with what the client wanted.

The key is that regardless of how negative the feedback may be, you need to sift through it and look for ways you can use it to make the next draft better. Nobody likes to hear negative feedback but in every bit of feedback there is something you can leverage to strengthen it in future drafts.

I think part of the problem is we as writers have been raised on the school/university system of receiving grades as an evaluation tool. We submit writing in the form of essays or assignments and we seek positive appraisal as a result. Writing in the real world is far different. A first draft is just the first step in a long process of completion so when we get early feedback, it’s not about ‘getting an A on the piece’ it’s about finding ways to make it better.

Be the defender of your story’s soul

This is where knowing the craft and understanding the fundamental elements of your story are so important. At some point in the process someone is going to suggest changes that will completely undermine your story’s structural integrity. Everyone else will be coming to the project with a different agenda and you will be the last great defender of the story you want to tell. So you need to know when these “death notes” are coming and find a way to address the issue without ruining your story.

I’ve had several experiences where I had to find a way to push back on producers notes because I could see they would totally unravel the story. Each time, I made my case and found a way to appease the producer without removing those key elements from the story. You need to know your story inside and out because you will certainly face this situation too at some point in your writing career.