Again I sort of wonder if there is ever a correct method for handle critiques of your work. Once again murder leaps to mind.
Lets face it, not something a lot of people have to face as an integral part of their day in and day out job. No one really cares on how someone stocks the shelves at Wal-Mart, or stands over your shoulder giving someone a running critique on how they deep fry Fries.
There are days though as a writer that's all you seem to hear is the high pitched yammering of someone who thinks they can do it better than you. Particularly in Hollywood, particularly in those that hang around and hang onto the film industry. Often they can't do it at all, which is why I do it. Write, that is.
Yet upon every draft of every script I have to buckle myself into my office chair and put on my goggles for a whirlwind of "notes", and "bulletpoints", and "suggestions". These omnibus Thoughts cover just about every noodling aspect of a script from character to story to minutia. More often than not they contradict one another and make no sense whatsoever.
Yet you are supposed to some how take these notes and re-write an already fully formed story incorporating all these scatterbrained ideas that are half the time not relevant to the story. I do, for the most part.
That is not the hard part. Sure it is frustrating and sometimes downright absurd to try and re-write a horror script with a dancing chicken, but you do it because its a paycheck. Eventually (well, hopefully) the producers or whoever is responsible for the now montrosity of a script you find yourself writing sobers up and realizes horror has no use for dancing man-sized chickens.
The worst kind of critics to deal with are the ones that have nothing worth listening to at all. They find every minor and major point in a script and proceed to tear into it with ruthless abandon. At the end of a two page emailed rants (critics like these typically hide behind email, or if they're really professional, four page coverages) you are left with a feeling of, What the Hell Was That? How can I use the fact that I suck to make this script better?
At least the first couple times that happens to you. Then you get followed around by the nagging feeling that you must really suck. At the finaly stage you reach acceptance. More like, Fuck You. I'm not really that bad.
Still you wonder, even after you've broken down and analyzed these sad little encounters with these sad little people with nothing to spew but insults, Why?
Keep it Sexy, America.
