This week we’re reposting some old articles.
Ideally, you’re getting your notes from your friends and family, and ideally, because these people care about you, their comments will find the right balance between supportive and honest. (Unless you have bad friends, in which case, you have worse problems than script notes.)
However, in this internet age of ours, there’s a good chance that you’re either going to give notes to a stranger or you’ll be receiving them from one, and because it’s the internet, there’s a distinct possibility that someone’s going to tell you something pointlessly cruel and stupid about your script and your ability as a writer.
I haven’t encountered anything like that with my own scripts. But I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve been that shitty little intern going out of his way to be as mean as possible in his coverage. Granted, when I was doing that, the writers were never going to read my words. But we all know that asshole-ry around notes exists, whether it’s from some troll you agreed to swap notes with in a comments section or from a grumpy reader who just got his second parking ticket in a week because the local traffic cop is an asshole and the distribution company he interns at doesn’t have it’s own parking lot. (Definitely not a personal example, I swear!)
Honesty Without Compassion
There’s a certain philosophy about critiquing, let alone script notes, that you can say whatever you want to anyone and it’s all fine because, hey, you’re just being “honest,” and if your artist or your writer can’t handle it, they don’t belong. Indeed, all of us have probably seen Simon Cowell reduce a bad singer to a sobbing mess or Gordon Ramsay tear into a chef with a profanity laden rant or some critic eviscerate the new blockbuster, and some of us think that’s how we’re supposed to behave when commenting on each other’s work. They think it’s their duty to call out bad screenwriting and try to dissuade anyone unworthy from ever opening Final Draft again.
This is not the case.
When Cowell tells the pie-eyed dairy farmer from the Midwest that he can’t sing or when Ramsay screams profanities at the stubborn head chef, they’re doing it for the entertainment of the audience. When it comes to notes, you’re not an entertainer. Your job, your only job, is to be helpful. You’re not a gatekeeper. You’re not the screenwriting police. You’re not an executioner. Your duty isn’t to dictate what you think good writing is or who gets to do it. You’re just here to tell the writer how their work made you feel and communicate that to the best of your ability. That’s it.
The Underdogs
A massive part of a screenwriter’s job, one way or another, is to use narrative to make an audience feel empathy for an underdog. All of us trying to make it in this industry are underdogs, provided we treat our peers with respect. Empathy is a two-way street, and if you can’t apply the same principle to your fellow human beings that you do to your fictional characters, you might want to consider the possibility that you’re incompetent.
“Honesty without compassion is brutality.” I wish I could remember who said this to me or where it’s from. But it’s true. Don’t be a dick. We have enough of those already.