After months of baking, your script is finally ready to come out of the oven for feedback. You serve your masterpiece to your agent, writing group, boyfriend, co-worker and maybe even a consultant. Everyone has an opinion. Revamp the first act. Make your protagonist a dentist instead of a lawyer. Change the location from Peoria to New Orleans. You quickly take apart your first born and cram in every suggestion in order to appease everyone. Suddenly, your script resembles a bad casserole of mismatched leftovers. What went wrong? This was supposed to be the magic draft that you submit to Austin or Nicholl.

As a consultant, there is nothing more depressing than reading a client’s revision and discovering it’s less promising than the first version, even though the writer followed every suggestion to the letter. The truth is the draft immediately following feedback is sometimes worse than the original effort. It may be disheartening, especially if you shelled out several hundred dollars for a professional reader or spent hours going over the story line-by-line with your writers group. Are they all idiots?! Why even get feedback at all? It usually isn’t the feedback that is wrong; it’s the writer’s zeal to improve every word and please every reader. In the process, the writer loses sight of his or her unique voice.

The trick to feedback is similar to listening to your teen whining about his friends or your body when you’re trying on a swimsuit. You have to know what to ignore and when to take action. Perhaps your story doesn’t work in a different setting, but you only discovered that by trying other locations. Maybe dentist doesn’t fit your heroine, but librarian makes more sense than a lawyer. You’ve overhauled the first act, but that’s exposed a problem in the climax so that needs attention as well. The key to rewriting after feedback is not to follow every suggestion literally, but to use your imagination to come up with a perfect mix of solutions, whether it’s inspired by the reader’s advice or an alternative direction that will still fix the problem. The reader’s note is an important flag that something is amiss. As the writer, it’s your duty to preserve the flavor of your premise, plot and characters, while seasoning the script with the best changes.

The most successful revisions I’ve read occurred when a writer used my notes as a springboard to invent an even better answer to the problem and carry the script to another level. Clients always think it’s odd when we caution them not to rush and send us their next draft. Why would we turn down a job?! It’s better to let the first draft after feedback stew a while, and then show us your savory last course.

The feedback draft is an interim learning assignment, a healthy snack before dinner. In the next draft, you’re the only cook. This is where you fine-tune the ingredients by keeping the salsa added by your sous chef and tossing out the extra cheese. It may seem hopeless after you’ve overhauled the first act and changed your main character’s motivation, but then suddenly, everything in the script clicks. It’s the balance of your passion, your story and constructive input from an unbiased reader that results in the tastiest recipe and meshes into a solid final draft.