From Idea to Script to Sale
How To Give Feedback in a Writers’ Group
For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at how to form and run a writers’ group—that thing you need to take your writing to the next level, to make sure it’s good enough when it gets to an important producer or studio.
I mentioned four things that you need to do when giving feedback in the group:
- • Be honest about how the writing strikes you
- • Don’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings
- • Be specific about what you feel needs to be improved
- • Avoid broad generalities: comments like “really loved it” aren’t helpful
It may seem cold to say things like don’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings, but you really have to get in that mindset for the group to work. It has to be about HELPING your fellow writers, helping them to get a script to be good enough to succeed—and that means saying exactly what you think, no censoring!
How does a script get good enough to be optioned, bought and made? By being amazing. And your goal in the writers’ group should be to tell each writer how to fix the problems in the script and make it better. Obviously, you shouldn’t say, “Boy, your ear for dialogue stinks.” That would be attacking the person! Instead, you say, “The dialogue didn’t work for me—it was too stiff at times…” and then you point to specific places in the script where that was the case.
Once you’ve made your comment on why the dialogue didn’t work, other members can chime in and agree or disagree. Why? Because if I’m the writer, I want to know how many people had problems with the dialogue. If it’s 50% I know I need to work on that dialogue. If it’s one person… well, maybe not.
THERE ARE NO RIGHT OR WRONG ANSWERS WHEN GIVING FEEDBACK.
It’s like looking at a painting—you can love it, I can hate it—neither of us is “right” because it’s just the way we see it.
And that’s the great thing about honest feedback—you as the writer get to hear how your work REALLY struck people. Then you know what worked, what didn’t work, and can think about how to rewrite.
The worst thing—the death knell for a writer’s group—is if people start explaining why they wrote it the way they did. For example, Mark gets a comment that his act two climax wasn’t strong enough. And if Mark says, “What I was going for was a kind of understated moment….” Etc., etc. What has Mark done? He’s tried to explain away the feedback. What you MEANT to do isn’t important, you KNOW what you meant to do. The point is, how did the writers react to that 2nd act climax? Draw them out on THAT—don’t spend one second talking about [which is really justifying] what you meant to do.
Good feedback is gold—it will make you a better writer and it will make your script have a better chance in the marketplace. Why ever wouldn’t you want to go out and join one/start one NOW?
Copyright © Diane Lake
24Jan21
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Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com