I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script (2009)
villagevoice.com
villagevoice.com
Andy also had a great strategy to start writing: put it on the internet. Nothing is better for brutally honest feedback than the internet. The Martian was certainly way better for it.
I wouldn't post my work on the Internet, though. The problem with the internet is that there's a lot of, frankly, very poor quality feedback that might be brutally honest, but also isn't useful. People will tell you loudly and intently that you must do something in way X, but the reality is that the professional advice would be way Y, and for your situation, way Z is also OK. Everyone (myself included) has a tendency to sound super certain of things they should actually be maybe 50-60% certain about.
And heaven help you if you happen to talk about anything political or otherwise controversial. Then you either end up in a room of yes-men who agree with and love everything you do, or a chamber of endless hate and rage at your existence.
The way I've heard it (I _think_ from Sanderson), people are generally quite good at telling you where something is wrong but _awful_ at telling you how to fix it.
Though I wonder how far can this idea can be traced.
But I will say, the feedback:
> He was way more interested in telling his one story than in being a writer. It was like buying all the parts to a car and starting to build it before learning the basics of auto mechanics. You’ll learn a lot along the way, I said, but you’ll never have a car that runs.
is not as considerate as the author thinks it is. It's correct, but it would also be pretty brutal to hear, because it discounts the fact that this person's poor work was still a lot of work for them. It doesn't validate the effort. I don't think the problem is that people think screenwriting is easy. They think it's hard, they put a lot of work into it, after all -- they just also think they succeeded.
So I think a kinder way to put this would be something like: "You have a great sense of enthusiasm for the story and you have clearly put a lot of effort into it. What I recommend as your next step is that you work on refining this into a form that matches the expectations of people who professionally read scripts. You can do that by attending X class, or Y workshop, or reading Z books/scripts/whatever. Mostly, you can do it by reading lots of scripts, and writing even more - so I encourage you to keep writing!"
That is, tell them the exact same thing, but in a way which doesn't also imply 'you have failed at this,' and instead says 'you can succeed at this, but you haven't yet, there's more to do.'
This absolutely could still fail - honestly, the acquaintance in the story sounds like a bit too much of a dick to get the message. And maybe it isn't true - maybe this person will never become a good writer. In all probability, that's what'll happen. But there's no reason to slam the door shut.
After this situation has happened enough, you eventually realize that brutal honesty really is the most humane approach, because otherwise they just aren't going to listen, and it'll be one long, unpleasant train wreck.
I don't know if I agree that brutal honesty is the most humane, but it will certainly save you time on a hopeless endeavor because they'll stop coming to you for dopamine hits.
Consideration is always nice, but if I didn't get it from someone who was giving (free) candid advice I wouldn't call them a dick for it.
I don't agree with this statement. Being reasonably considerate and empathetic is a mandatory requirement of all human interaction, it is not optional just because you are in the position of being asked for something. It's not "a pat on the head" to be helpful and not insulting. Everyone has the right to be treated decently provided their behavior is minimally decent. Asking someone to do something for you is not sufficiently indecent to earn a rude response.
Further, if your goal is to make an impression on someone where they agree with and believe the point you're making, being an asshole to them is unlikely to do it. This story is a case in point - the person thought he was being rude and disengaged, and did not take his advice.
To be clear, I am not saying the author of this piece was intentionally being rude. Just that it makes a lot of sense, from the outside, why he came across that way given what he said.
If you behave reasonably and empathetically, and someone takes issue with it, they're the one with the problem, not you. By behaving tolerantly, you make the other person's intolerance more obvious.
(Though again, like I said, not blaming the author. He clearly tried pretty hard to do the right thing here.)
I see what you're trying to do here (soften absolutely brutal feedback), but I personally hate that style.
Trying to be candid about feedback that is very much not candid is dishonest and gives its receiver false hope that might be unwarranted.
Also, feedback like this is unclear. If I received this feedback, I would be thinking "Was my piece good, but could be better if I take classes? Or did they hate it? If they hated it, why aren't they telling me?"
Just say the fucking thing.
It's just like layoff or application rejection emails, or announcements that something is going up in price. Nobody cares about how "we thought you had potential, but" or "as a work family, we sometimes need to make tough decisions" or "look at how much value we've provided over the years." Everyone knows that something bad's about to happen. Just say the fucking thing.
Any reasonably acute listener will hear this as condescension: “Oh, you worked so hard, bless your heart…”. I don’t think word-smithing the feedback to make it gentler really helps, because people (even bad writers) can see through bullshit. Better to treat the other person as deserving of honesty.
Why? Because it's a nepotistic *hit show. If you're in front of the camera, you have to literally suck someone off to get there (me too was only scratching the surface, both men and women are abused by it). The people that do have talent , of which there are many, are a dime a dozen. If you are already not a prodigy at your craft or have an industry in by the time you get there, you will waste your time.
Behind the scenes, it is only marginally better. You will end up working with some of the most insufferable people in the world who are so passionate about working in entertainment anything that they will work for free.
The industry is also on a precipice with AI which will absolutely decimate both on and off camera rolls. I tell kids all of the time, the entertainment industry is run by some of the most cut throat executives in the world and AI has given them the biggest gift in the world: the ability to gut the biggest expense in their balance sheets: labor.
And honestly, seeing Hollywood shrink is a good thing. It has ceased to be a good place both creatively and spiritually. This article is a prime piece of the general attitude of the industry.
I look forward to the author getting out competed by chatgpt. They all think they're safe, until they are not.
Edit: the downvoter really can't handle the truth. Everyone you see on screen has gotten there because of a favor either nepotism or sexual. I have too many friends who have revealed the dark truth about it. The place isn't to be admired and it's one of the worst industries on the planet.
"I'm a land surveyor. A woman in my congregation came up to me after our church service. 'I just have a quick question; can you tell me where exactly is the back property line between me and my neighbor?'
"I told her that I couldn't answer her question off the top of my head, but I could look it up properly if she would call me at the office during the week. 'Oh, goodness, that's not necessary. I wouldn't want to bother you at work.'"
But he's right. Many aspiring programmers have fallen for the same trap. They don't want to learn to program, they want to have made a program. While you can write your magnum opus, a video game, or an operating system kernel, without learning to program first, it's infinitely more difficult than doing it the other way around.
If you ask a pro for feedback; especially one that demands a lot from themselves (like most folks at the top of their game), you will be judged as a pro.
I have been on both sides of this, on the asking side, as an artist, and on the judging side, as a software developer.
Eventually you reach a level of mastery where with just as little effort as you see the beginner's mistakes, you see the thought process that lead to those mistakes.
As soon as you're not a beginner their mistakes seem obvious, but approaching varied and complex problems often enough eventually gives way to the realization most beginner mistakes have similar underlying causes to the "professional" mistakes. It's only how far you need to zoom out to see the underlying cause of the mistake that changes.
—
The beginner does a poor job defining requirements so their Hello [name] generator form breaks when the user types in "\n John". They only made a label tall enough to show one line of text. They see it as "I didn't make the label autosize" or something though, even when told the solution.
The professional does a similarly poor job with requirements, and the system breaks down on some unexpected input in production months down the line... the professional might save the day and write a slick postmortem about how they saved the day using their skills. But it takes a lot more experience to reach the point where that experience evolves into a blanket change for project kickoffs for example, so the owners of external systems can better define requirements that affect them.
I don't know professional writing well enough to know if the situation is similar.
He's clearly had to deal with this issue a lot lol
In a lot of situations this would be terrible advice, not because the craft is not worthy of respect but because its much easier to accept the pain of learning a difficult craft if you have an end goal in sight, something you need to achieve that will provide the impetus for all the work you're going to have to do.
Once one has a unique skill or position, the number of people who think it would be swell if you could "do this one little favor" grows large in a jiffy.
This is why you pay the piper. The piper may in fact have the time, money, and interest in doing the favor. Nevertheless, the piper must be paid as a noise filter to keep out the riff-raff.
Paying the piper is what adults do and expect.
https://www.scriptslug.com/script/a-history-of-violence-2005
Did he ever finish this? Never heard of this movie.
I mean, I feel like a simple "no" would also suffice
My guess is that given the having to say "no" in this context over and over means the difficulty can get to you and you end up saying "yes" on occasion.
Doesn't sound pleasant. It's hard to say no.
What does this say about modern computer game development, where day-one patches are considered normal?