Take The Note, Not The Suggestion

The Spiky Art of Navigating Feedback

Have you ever felt punched in the gut by a note?

Have you ever been given feedback that made you want to set the building on fire? Have you ever been asked to give feedback, only to have no idea what to say? Maybe you really can’t articulate any specific faults — or maybe it needs so much work you don’t know where to begin. Perhaps you have plenty of feedback to share — pages, even! — but none of it is landing the way you hoped — and they seem to be growing angrier and angrier with every bullet point…

“And then on page seven, you get a little wordy…”

Some people treat feedback like a vibe check, and others, a chance to demonstrate their brilliance by dropping the most devastating “I’m just being honest” bombs imaginable. Worse — and in my experience, most common — is the “this is how I would do it…” crowd that doesn’t seek to understand your vision, so much as try to reshape it into theirs.

It’s maddening, it’s discouraging, it’s unhelpful.

Good feedback is incredibly important for writers — it doesn’t just keep gas in our tank, it helps keep us on the road. And in my opinion, it is one of the most undervalued, underestimated, and under-discussed disciplines in the creative process.

I am not a feedback expert — but I give and get notes a lot. Both for my writing and for my daywalker career in motion graphics (self plug alert). After two decades of notes calls, you start to pick up on the good, the bad, and the unhelpful.

So let’s start with the obvious:

Getting Notes Sucks

Somebody, somewhere is immediately like, “Nuh uh, I love feedback. I thrive on it.” Okay well hang on… let’s hold for the applause to die down…

Appreciating helpful criticism — which chips away at a scene, helps make incremental changes, and finds all the rough spots so you can polish them smooth — is quite different from feeling jubilant glee while someone itemizes the problems with something you labored over and care about… I like having clean teeth — I don’t enjoy going to the dentist.

Writing is hard. It takes time — way longer than it takes to read and criticize, and nobody else was there while you were working through the hardest parts, problem solving and organizing and editing. We know we don’t always nail the draft — but we poured ourselves into this. It’s vulnerable enough just sharing the thing, now we have to hear somebody pick it apart??

You’re gonna feel defensive sometimes. It’s gonna happen. It doesn’t mean you’re childish, it means you’re invested. You’ve made a part of yourself public, and you want to stand up for it. And — you want people to like your work. It’s okay to own that. When did that become considered a weakness? Give me a passionate advocate of their choices over a bored, disconnected nihilist any day.

If this is how you feel about your script, imagine how the readers feel.

This doesn’t mean it’s okay to fly off the handle on a notes call, it just means… don’t beat yourself up for feeling like getting notes sucks.

But It Doesn’t Have To…

The good news is, there’s a difference between the quality of your draft and your worth as a person. (Maybe re-read that once or twice.)

That may sound obvious, intellectually — cheesy, even — but tell that to your amygdala when somebody’s saying they don’t like your dialogue on page 17. What we know and what we feel don’t always play nice together.

No matter how many rounds of notes I sit through, there are still times when someone doesn’t “get” what I was going for, and it signals that part of my ego that reeaally wants to be seen as right, or talented, or genius... (yikes)

It takes some practice, and some intention, but you can get to a place where feedback isn’t scary — because you know it isn’t an attack. You aren’t falling under siege, you’re getting tactical. You’re getting second opinions. You’re facing an issue head-on, instead of pretending it isn’t there. The notes are in service to YOU — not the other way around.

Notes are perspective, not validation.

Will there still be discomfort getting notes? Probably, sometimes. You’re human. But — you can learn to kindly pat that part of you on the head, and tell it to breathe. Because ultimately, when you adopt a proactive mindset about notes, they won’t feel personal — they’ll feel motivating.

After all, you knew there would be work to do (there always is) — you just have more information now, and more perspective than you did before.

Side note: you will never regret taking time to process notes before responding... You will regret responding emotionally.

Notes vs. Suggestions

“Maybe you should kill that character off?”

“Could you make this more like The Bear?”

“What if instead of ‘Back to the Future’ you called it ‘Space Man From Pluto?’” (That’s a real suggestion. A real, live person actually pitched that.)

Chances are, you’ve received feedback like this. You asked for help finding cracks in the windows, and they gave you plans for a whole new building.

Thanks. Feels like a slap in the face.

Sometimes these comments are thoughtful, and sometimes they're totally off-base — but either way, they’re not actually notes. They’re suggestions. And while suggestions aren’t inherently bad, they can easily get in the way of the the most important part of the process: Diagnosing the problem.

A note is an observation. It’s a highlighter on something that isn't working — or could be working better. A suggestion is the pitch for how to fix it.

The best suggestions are born from a deep understanding of your intention as the writer — but, let’s be honest, most don’t come that way. More often, suggestions are gut-level reactions, shaped by the reader’s own taste, experience, or creative instincts. That’s not a flaw — that’s human nature. It’s not your job to follow every suggestion. Your job is to identify what problem the suggestion is trying to fix.

If the suggestion is “Could you make this more like the The Bear?” they’re probably not suggesting you need more scenes in the kitchen, or that you should make your third season ponderously slow — but they might be touching on a lack of tension or conflict. Maybe you don’t need to “kill off a character,” but the reader might be sensing that character’s arc has become muddy, or annoying, or has simply already resolved.

Suggestions are usually motivated by a note — whether the person giving it knows it or not. But sometimes… they’re simply creative intrusions. Tourists with an opinion… So how do you tell the difference?

Sorting the Trash from the Treasure

This is the tricky part.

Not all notes are created equal. Some will hit you like a bolt of lightning — you’ll feel the truth of them immediately, and wonder why didn’t I think of that?? Others will confuse and frustrate you, and some will feel just flat out wrong.

So here’s what I look for:

Patterns. If you get a note one time, consider it. If you get the same note three times, pay attention. If there’s a spot where readers continually bump — even if they pitch you wildly different fixes — they’re signaling the same problem.

The Source. All feedback is filtered through the person giving it, and that person has tastes, preferences, blind spots, biases… If you’re asking a seasoned writer for notes, you can be sure those will be different from what your cousin Bert might have to say. One might speak to the craft, the other might just know which scenes were the coolest. Both have their value — just know which one you’re dealing with.

(If you’re in a professional writer’s room… you take the note.)

Gut Reaction. If something makes you immediately recoil, that means it hit a nerve. Which means it’s close to something true. This doesn’t mean the note is correct, but it does mean there’s something worth investigating in there... “Why does this note bother me?” “What would be lost by taking it?” “What am I protecting?” If the answer is “Because I like it this way,” that’s totally valid — but you can defend it with purpose, and not with ego.

Time. Some notes are just wrong — until they’re not. It’s okay to let notes simmer, even ones you disagree with. Your brain will keep doing its thing in the background while you hack away at other problems. You don’t always need an instant (or permanent) verdict, and a “wrong” note, can lead to the right one.

The best notes don’t tell you what to do — they remind you what you’re trying to do. Take them seriously, not literally.

It’s Tough on Both Sides of the Table

If somebody asked you to reassemble a train wreck, you might look around at the field of twisted metal and thousands of bits of scattered debris and very reasonably think to yourself, “I’m gonna pass.”

I once opened a script — submitted to me by a student — and on page one, knew it was going to be a rough read. The format — all over the place. The dialogue — awkward and devoid of personality. Halfway through, I couldn’t tell you one meaningful thing about any of the (way too many) characters.

I remember a sinking feeling, and thinking to myself, “Oh man, what am I going to say to this kid?”

But he’s trying to learn.

I was asked for help.

And I’ve been there… So I have to say something.

“… Uh… Your title is, like, so good...”

You want to be helpful. But also honest. And supportive. And constructive, but not enabling. You don’t want to blow smoke, and you want to somehow avoid making either of you cry. How do you walk a tightrope like that?

As Ted Lasso would say: Be Curious. Not Judgmental.

In my case, I started by asking this student a lot of questions — casually, conversationally. I wanted to understand his intentions, his influences, and the parts of this script he was most passionate about. I asked about the characters, where he saw their stories going. I asked about the world, and what kind of potential reveals he had in store…

Questions are the secret sauce of feedback. Because they don’t just clarify the writer’s intentions, they lower defenses, and they tell the writer (consciously or not) what to be thinking about as they approach revisions.

Once the questions are answered, feedback becomes a matter of indicating key moments where things are unclear, confusing, or where things slow down. You’ll more deeply understand the intention, so identifying places where it didn’t translate becomes that much easier.

I didn’t have to give this student pages of notes, or itemized bullet points about every perceived misstep — rewrites are inevitable, so one thing at a time. Instead, I helped him zero in on “the vision” by simply trying to understand it myself. For that conversation at least, we became a writer’s room — puzzling out the best version, together.

The Rewrite Begins With Listening

Good feedback is more about understanding than it is about prescriptive fixes. Whether you’re giving notes or getting them, the goal isn’t to win — it’s to get clearer on the story you’re trying to tell.

And yeah, sometimes it’ll still sting. That’s okay.

But if you’re learning to ask better questions, to stay open without losing your voice, and to meet the mess with curiosity instead of blazing, righteous fire — then you’re not just taking the note. You’re becoming the kind of writer who actually knows what to do with it.

Feedback isn’t a fight. It’s fuel.

If this post hit home and you're staring down a pile of notes… I made a Feedback Toolkit to help you sort through it — a way to organize, process, and prioritize notes on the path to your next rewrite — It’s available for paid subscribers as a PDF or Google Doc.

What’s been your experience with feedback — on either end? Any horror stories, hard-won wisdom, or surprisingly great notes that made all the difference?

Drop a comment and share what you’ve learned. Somebody else out there probably needs it.