Saturday, August 30, 2008

Nice Notes from Bizarro

Here's a thing from Jill Golick, good to read but I'll summarise:

What if people only gave nice notes? Only praised where praise were due and left out any neutral or negative notes? I think the logic is good: Writers would recognise that things that went unpraised would need improvement and would want to bring everything up to the point of being praised.

Would it work? Could it work? I love the idea, looking at things sideways is always a good move.

I believe it would work with already skilled writers, I don't think it would work on unskilled ones. I know that when I started I needed to be told what was actually wrong. I didn't have the judgement born of experience to see that an unpraised thing might need improvement.

Though I think it would work with me now - because I've been through the mill.

What do you think?



What's on the turntable? "Incantations, Part One" by Mike Oldfield

2 comments:

Lucy V said...

I don't think it would work. That's not because I'm a script reader either, though perhaps because I've been around enough clients needing crit - so actually maybe.

Anyway: I find a lot of writers want to concentrate more on what's good about their script than what's not. They want the praise but they don't want to think about what needs doing. Telling them what's not good about their script forces them to face up to what needs going over. Obviously shouldn't do this harshly. Also: lots of people wouldn't know where to start with the bad points if they're left unspoken: many clients have bad structure for example but *think* what they've written is good structure - they need someone who sees structure every single day in different forms to point out alternatives to consider.

That's what I think, anyway.

Adaddinsane said...

You're very probably right.