"Give me a lobotomy"

What to do if you get bad notes on your work

There’s a metaphor I like to use when describing how to deal with bad notes writers might be given by execs or readers: it’s like you’re a doctor, and a patient comes in and says, with absolute conviction, “I want you to give me a lobotomy”. 

No doctor in this scenario would do what the patient is asking for. Instead, you would ask their patient why they feel like they need a lobotomy, and they eventually reveal it’s because they have a headache and their head really hurts. It then falls to you to very gently explain that while they totally get why they think scooping out a chunk of their brain might cure their headache, it would also give them irreparable brain damage - they don’t want that, right? So before you crack open their skull: what if you tried giving them an aspirin and see if that works?

Lucy Farrett as documentary director turned reluctant detective Esther Farrago in Murder for Dummies, making the face every writer makes when receiving notes.

There’s two reasons I like this analogy, beyond the temptation to ask people offering crappy notes whether they’ve already had a lobotomy:

The first is that the patient - in this case, the person who hired you¹ - is not the expert: you are. You are the person they are paying to understand how stories work. It is not (usually) your job to blindly follow orders and implement the notes you are given “as written” whether you like them or not.

If you think the notes would do harm to your script, you have to push past your initial, inevitable reaction of “fuck off!”, consider whether they might actually have a point (it’s normal to reject criticism when you first receive it, but are they really “stupid notes” or are you just being a precious little flower?) —

— and THEN - if you still believe the direction you are being given is wrong - it’s on you to provide a thoughtful, reasoned, respectful explanation for why it might not be wise to do exactly as they’ve asked. 

But pushing back on notes is not enough by itself: if all you can offer is an explanation for why you won’t implement the notes, the person who’s hired you won’t be very happy - and your script won’t get any better. Screenwriters - especially newer ones - don’t tend to have much trouble defending their choices: our screenplays are our precious widdle babies and it’s natural that we’ll speak up for them when we’re - oh sorry, they’re - criticised.

But this is the main reason I compare screenwriting to being a doctor when it comes to receiving notes: it is still your job to fix their problem. 

A bad doctor would hear that patient asking for a lobotomy, tell them they’re wrong, and insist they go away. A good doctor knows they have a duty of care - that the patient came in because they are experiencing pain, and that pain is real. 

It’s common for a patient to have diagnosed themselves when they first walk into a doctor’s office (don’t pretend you don’t google your own symptoms). This is exactly what’s happening when you’re given bad notes on your work: your reader is trying to help you find the answer to their problem. And it’s normal to feel irked by a reader’s poor diagnosis of what is wrong with your story, but you need to remember that it’s not their job to accurately understand their problem.

It’s the reader’s job to feel the problem - to experience the ache or stab that makes them come to you for an answer. Just like you already do for the characters in your story, you need to understand the crucial difference between what your reader says they want (the lobotomy) and what they actually need to make them happy (the headache to go away).

I have a friend who, tragically, doesn’t know he isn’t funny. He regularly offers me unsolicited, often-dreadful ideas for my comedy. Years ago, this friend came to a preview of a new stage show Casual Violence were taking to Edinburgh, and came up to me afterwards in the bar with an awful pitch for the second half of the show. I nodded and smiled back at him while in my head I was muttering “this is the stupidest fucking idea I’ve ever heard”.

And trust me, it was - but the next day, when I tried digging into why he’d pitched it in the first place, I understood what it was about the story that wasn’t working for him - and, with the rest of my group, found our own solution to solve the bump he was having and improve the show. 

That was the day it first clicked for me that even bad notes are helpful: again, what the patient is feeling is real (even if the patient is stupid). The whole job of being a screenwriter-for-hire is to be a problem-solver; good problem-solvers do not dismissively hand-wave badly articulated problems.

Be a doctor. Diagnose, identify, fix.

When you do this, not only will you make your note-giver happy, but you’ll be happy too: your script will be better, because you fixed a real issue that existed in your story.

When you’re being given notes by a person who’s paying you, it is easier to fall into the trap of “well, I should implement the notes exactly as written, even if I don’t agree with them, because they’re in charge”. But unless you have a very bad boss who just wants you to write exactly what they tell you word-for-word² - 99% of the time, the note-giver is happy for you to find your own solution.

If you come back to them with your next draft and say “hey, so I didn’t change line 94 to “Cool beans, daddio!” like you said, because Sally’s just found out her dad was killed in an accident and so she probably wouldn’t say that to the policewoman, but I agree the scene needed some comedy to cut the tension and so now the inflatable sumo wrestler outfit she was wearing gradually deflates throughout the scene” - trust me, they’ll be thrilled with you³. 

I wanted to relaunch my newsletter with this subject because right now, screenwriters - and creators in general, across the entertainment industry - are facing a problem a bit more existential than whether “Cool beans, daddio!” is something Sally would say. Most of us are painfully aware of how rough the industry has been for the last few years. Even the TV executives I talk to are, across the board, struggling with the same thing the writers, artists and creators are: we all got into this industry because we love stories and want to make things, but the people above our pay grade are reluctant to take a chance on anything.

We’re all in the same leaking boat, and we don’t know how to plug the leaks, or which direction to swim. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the existential-feeling problem my colleagues and friends and I are facing, and I think it has been hugely misdiagnosed. I think we’re starting to see the shoots of a new, better direction growing in the entertainment industry - and, if we nurture them, a reason to be optimistic, whether you’re a creator or a consumer - but they’re being overlooked by the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of tech companies. A lot of people are feeling hopeless, and that the decimation of our industry of professional storytelling is inevitable - but I don’t believe it is. Yes, a lot is being threatened, and a lot is at risk. But there might be a way through.

In future newsletters, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on where we should place our hopes, and what we can do in a practical way to prove the value of our work and support those whose work we love - in spite of those who do not see the inherent value of art and stories.

What I’m good at is fixing stories, not fixing industries - so I don’t know for sure if my thoughts on where we’re headed and which direction we should turn are the ones we collectively will take. But narrative is something we all apply to our lives whether we’re writers or not, and I have ideas I’m excited to share on how we might be able to steer our story back towards a happy ending. 

So I hope you’ll subscribe, and - if you have notes - I look forward to reading them (even if they’re dumb). 

— J

PS: Watch Murder for Dummies - the six-episode horror-comedy murder mystery series I made with my most talented friends AND my most talented enemies! It’s all free, it’s all on YouTube, and it’s all really good. THANKS!

1. Something I might get into in a future newsletter is that it’s unbelievably common and easy for writers to shit on execs for giving bad notes, but I’ve genuinely worked with some wonderful execs over the years who give thoughtful, helpful notes that have hugely elevated my work. It’s a genuine bugbear when people tar all execs with the same brush - not every exec has good storytelling instincts, but more do than people assume.

2. Regrettably, I’ve worked with a couple of those, but they have been mercifully rare.

3. And so will I. I defy you to name any story that would not be improved with your lead character wearing an inflatable sumo wrestler costume that gradually deflates while they receive bad news.