The Selfish Gene Feedback

Giving feedback on someone else’s screenplay can seem like a waste of your own precious and limited screenwriting time. Whether it’s caring for others, working a full-time job, studying to get that full-time job for when you don’t sell your action/romcom/fantasy epic (I forgot the spoiler warning. Yeah, sorry, odds are you aren’t selling it for six figures). Time is not infinite and (spoiler alert, remembered this time) nor are you. With all that then, why do people take the time to give feedback on other peoples’ screenplays? 

Maybe they’re nice? Hard to believe but those people exist somewhere despite what the internet tells us. However, even if you are the nicest person in the world with nothing better to do than give feedback all day, every day, there is a metric poop tonne of scripts out there. All crying out for some attention.

For most of us then, giving feedback isn’t purely about being “nice” and altruistic.The reasons can be various. A read for a read (or quid pro quo if you prefer). Earning community good will. Perhaps you’re even after some of those SWN tokens to spend on exciting things down the road. All selfish enough reasons but here’s the main selfish reason why you should do it:

Giving feedback helps you as a writer

Yes, that’s right. Giving well thought out and considered feedback will, most importantly, help you to be a better writer. It’s simple when you think about it. To give good feedback requires more than “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” 

Side note: This is probably the most unhelpful feedback possible to give (sorry mum). And I’ve just realized what’s going to be the first comment on this article (and the second).

Delve into those surface reactions and examine why you didn’t like that character. Why that plot point felt off for you. Why you stopped reading after 10 pages. All those things require an understanding of character development, structures of plotting, themes and all the other good stuff that a writer requires. A surface level examination isn’t going to get it done. 

Once you’ve covered that then can come other writerly workouts: 

• Offering solutions (even if they are the “bad version”) and explaining how they would “fix” your perceived issue. 
• Examples from similar films and TV. Finally all that time you spend educating yourself (despite what people told you about wasting your life “just watching TV.”) can prove useful.
• Expectations of the genre and how by breaking the genre “rules” you will irritate or anger the audience. 

All these things require putting real writerly effort into your thoughts.

I’m sure you can see then how giving well thought out feedback is going to help with your own writing. You get to build up those critical muscles on unfinished work. Doing so with professional screenplays can be difficult because (usually) there isn’t much room to improve upon them. Going at your own work can be difficult because who can’t be blind to their own flaws? Having something not fully polished and not personally relevant can really help push your skills forward.

To hammer it home one more time: Giving feedback helps you to identify the fundamentals. It helps you to better understand screenwriting in general. It helps you learn to examine your own screenwriting. All in all, it just helps you.

I’d like to think my screenwriting prowess has improved over time and I put a good portion of that down to forcing myself to really think about my feedback.

So, let’s all be selfish and give great feedback to help ourselves!

by Chidori – aka the one who brings the scary feedback to table reads.