Being able to give and receive good feedback requires trust, faith in the knowledge that everyone in the feedback process wants to do their best by you. Trust happens when everyone shares the understanding that they are all there to serve the greater goal of making the idea better — not to win arguments, prove a point, get their way, one-up someone else, or reinforce their ego.

We believe you can’t have an amazing story without allowing yourself to be vulnerable. I don’t think it belongs in the doc about feedback necessarily, but more about process, but I want to make a note before I forget it. If you don’t dig deep, access the emotions that made you choose this story above all others, then the story will not resonate with the audience in the way you want it to. 

Foundational to successful feedback give-and-take is everyone buying into the idea of feedback itself. If you believe you already have full understanding of your story, already know exactly what your work is trying to do, if you think it’s beautiful just the way it is, you won’t be open to other people’s ideas. At Pixar they say that all ideas begin as “ugly babies” — and everyone is there to help the ideas grow up. Everyone has to believe that feedback is important, even necessary, to helping an idea achieve full fruition, and that shared buy-in will frame the discussion properly.

Great creative work comes from the heart, from our unique perspectives, has the fingerprints of our experience all over it. It is a warm, pulsing, living thing. But to become its best, we may have to give that work a haircut, a blood transfusion, or even an amputation — and that requires emotional detachment. So after we give birth to that initial draft on our own, we do best by turning to our “village” to help raise it, rely on our feedback partners to help us make the best decisions possible, and to make the necessary cuts. Or put another way, “write close to the heart, but edit at arms’ length.”

Vague notes like, “It’s good,” or “I didn’t really like it” or “It didn’t draw me in” don’t help your creative partners. Pointed notes like, “I didn’t follow the transition from high school to college” or “What was at stake in the scene about your mom?”, support creative partners. Specificity helps make criticism constructive rather than destructive: carving out details for the creator helps them rebuild, after the initial draft has been taken down. Learning how to give specific feedback also teaches each of us how to think about our own pieces more productively.

We are not our ideas. We put a lot of ourselves into them if they are any good, yet being able to separate ourselves from our work after doing a draft is crucial to making the work better. If everyone involved has a shared commitment to making the work better, and the shared understanding that dissecting the story is not the same as attacking the storyteller, then everyone can be free to be honest, which is ultimately best for the story.