From Josh: My Feedback Process

Katie, Megan, and I are all in a writer’s group together. We rotate submitting work and giving feedback every session. For me, this process is a throwback to my days in writing classes in film school.

Here’s the thing that people won’t tell you, though: both giving and receiving script feedback is a weird, tricky animal. Writing, in my experience, is either a deeply personal experience or a mercenary act completely divorced from emotional investment. In a group like this, you’re not necessarily going to get a ton of the latter. People will submit spec scripts, that’s true, but you tend to get a lot of personal material. When you do get spec scripts to review, it can be a little easier to be blunt and honest with your thoughts; the writer will have a level of emotional investment, sure, but they didn’t create the characters/world out of whole cloth, so critiques don’t necessarily hit you too deeply.

For those that might not be familiar with speculative (spec) scripts, they’re uncommissioned, unpaid scripts that a writer does ultimately for the sake of getting attention from people like producers or investors. It can apply to any script. However, as our group has many people who’d like to write for TV, the term is used colloquially to refer to a spec script for an existing TV show.

Alone Together falls into the personal category. The problem when you give feedback on a personal script is that writers tend to fall into one of two categories. First, egoists who think they’re the hottest of hot shits who take every critique personally. Second, Someone who literally hates everything they write and for whom writing is a slog. Katie and I are both the latter.

All writers are in some way, insecure about their writing (even full-blown type A’s). When you are, or are trying to help a type B, it’s hard to not feel lost in the wilderness. I had a moment like that. Feedback helped me. I can’t speak for Katie, but from my perspective the issue was actually too much feedback.

The script started out much more like a typical underdog sports movie. It was fun, it worked. But I could tell that there was an underlying darkness that wasn’t quite getting tapped into, and that Katie wasn’t thrilled. I asked the “Jimbo Questions,” focusing heavily on “what is it you want the script to say?” Katie gave me her answers. It was clear that seed of it was in that current draft, but it was lost in the conventions of a sports film.

We knew at that point that this was going to be one of the two films that she and I were going to shoot. Katie was at an inflection point and had a lot of uncertainty. After all, a lot of the people giving feedback to her (including myself, the original draft was fun) really liked the script. I could sense the conflict within her. So I gave her a pep talk.

“Listen,” I said,  “Forget all the feedback and the noise for a second. You are busting your ass doing production work (sidebar: this is a A-FUCKING LOT of work) to make this happen. When it’s done and you’re sitting in a theater at a film festival, after all the pain and sweat you’ll have to go through to make it happen, what story will make you feel like it was worth it?”

So she rewrote the whole damned thing and took the script into a totally different direction. The people in our writer’s group were shocked, but most were pleasantly surprised. We gave her some more feedback, and she brought the script to a place where she was happy with it.

When people give feedback, everyone will have their own vision with the way the characters should be and the way the story should go. But when your money and your time are on the line, the writer’s vision is what matters. Your job is to clear out enough of the weeds to help them see the path in front of their feet. Much of the time, that’s nuts and bolts stuff. But for me, I keep one question as my north star: “what are you trying to say with this script?”

-Josh