A piece of advice about notes for the first-time writer

This is probably the best advice in the world I could give to new writers. Have you just completed your first script? Do you think it's better than sliced bread? Are you telling everybody it's the best thing ever written?

I know you did because we all did. Everybody falls in love with that first script. Everybody feels like it's the most brilliant thing ever put on paper. EVERYBODY.

Know why? You're proud. You finished. You worked your ass off and devoted hours upon hours to this thing and it's a creation of your mind. It's an accomplishment, and now you want your reward.

You give it to your mom. She loves it! Look what her baby did! Yay! You give it to your friend, the one who writes poetry. OMG this is the best script he's ever read. It's the only one he's ever read, but man it is amazing. You're feeling pretty good. Everybody says it's great! I'm great! This is the best screenplay ever and I'm going to sell it for a jillion bazillion dollars!

Then you give it to a screenwriter and you just know you're going to get notes like "OMG I wish I was as good as you" and "This is the most amazing thing I've ever read and I'm going to pass it to my agent right away!" You wait, champagne chilling in the fridge. Fortune and fame are on their way.

Then you get the notes.

What happened was, the writer read your script and began writing notes. This is a huge favor because they really wanted to work on their own project, but they decided to take some time to help out a new writer because, hey, somebody helped them once. They set aside time in their day and went page by page, explaining what needs to be fixed because that's what you said you wanted. You were looking for notes, real notes, not just a pat on the back. So the writer tells you what doesn't work. Some things work, but really, this script is terrible. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but yeah, you've got a lot of work to do. This is not the genius you thought it was.

Now at this moment you have a choice. You can sit down with those notes and go over them carefully and think about them and thank your lucky stars someone took the time to tell you all this before you embarrassed yourself. It'll take a lot of work, but in the end it will be so worth it when you know you have a great script.

Or you can get angry, throw things and tell the screenwriter to go to hell because they don't know shit about shit and you're a genius and you're going to make a jillion bazillion dollars because your mom and your poet friend think this is brilliant and they're way smarter than some asshole who wrote some movie about a giant killer eel that ran on SYFY last week at 2am. Fuck that writer. They don't understand your vision.

Here's my advice: Don't do the second thing.