Feedback for a People-Pleaser

As an accredited people-pleaser, I have developed a particular set of skills, including data collector of comments, facial expressions, and body language. You can interpret any head turn as a good or bad sign that you’re on the right track. If you become really reactive, you could adjust every single sub-behavior based on the micro-expression of those people for whom you seek to keep happy.

I recently saw a video about bird murmurations, creating swirling shapes in the sky. It seems magical, but on a basic level, these birds have simply learned to stick together without bumping into each other. The resulting patterns exhibit a grand harmony of existence.

It reminded me of my family, which stuck together in a domestic murmuration pattern, a feedback loop adjusting with each unpredictable swing of emotion. Sort of like a less affluent, and much less hilarious version of the Bluthe family.

When it comes to creating characters and stories, you have to create a more conscious feedback loop to take into consideration the audience. For me as a people-pleaser, I need to feel like my words have caused some effect on the audience. Ideally, some emotion, and an experience they will remember, because that way, I have justified my existence, proving my value.

Now, I know I’m not supposed to allow others to determine my value. As humans, we all should value ourselves without having to prove anything. And yet, I still crave that validation. Maybe some day, I can create something purely for myself, and survive without money to buy things that keep me alive like food, shelter, and healthcare… Sigh.

In the meantime, I will continue to use my drive to tell stories to possibly make an impact on how others feel, think, and at some point, build enough of a business model to win the contradiction of selling my creative expression.

As part of that journey, I must get a sense of whether my writing has the effect that I intend, especially before spending thousands of dollars. I must seek that glorious, dreaded feedback.

So... feedback. How to get fed back. I go to three sources, and each provides a different value.

Source 1: The Audience

Going to your audience for feedback can provide the most illuminating insight. You learn quickly from the rinse and repeat of making several short films in those first early years of filmmaking. You can spend days on a concept, rewrite and record, go through the editing process for weeks, and feel like you’ve honed the best possible version of the idea that was originally in your head.

Then, with a deep pride, you present this short film to your loved ones, and... at the moment that you watch it in their presence, all the quality and joy baked into your creation just falls away, dripping down into the sewer, as you suddenly notice all the cracks, the mistakes, the awful choices, and ultimately failed efforts you made at every step of the process. The audience does not need to provide one word of feedback. You just feel it from watching it with others in the room. You notice everything, and you regret the day you were born.

With writing, you don’t get the same effect, because you don’t know exactly which paragraph they are reading as you stand over them with desperation. I often use my beloved wife as my first audience, because she gives me the raw, unfiltered, back-stabby, but helpful response, the kind that provides instant clarity.

Outside of a trusted reader, table reads offer the cheapest, potentially most satisfying way to put your writing to the test. Getting it up on its feet in front of an audience, hearing your words come to life, can boost your ego in the immediate present tense, until the point at which it inevitably stops working, and you suddenly find your ego pierced with a railroad spike of reality, deflating it to an airless thin-skinned husk.

I once conducted a stage reading of a 260-page rough draft of a feature film. For context, you typically expect a minute per page, so 120 pages gets you a 2-hour movie. Seeing that page count really should have been the first and final red flag not to share with friends and colleagues, or really anyone with a relationship you value as “worth keeping.”

We bunked conventional thinking because the script included lots of disconnected sketches, so we hoped to create more of a rapid-fire production line to test which scenes worked and which scenes deserved instant death by deletion squad.

That script was so messy and unprepared for prime time that we had to add a narrator to sew together some sort of structure, someone that could add a little extra comic flair, so we chose the most unlikely, absurdly unfunny person we could imagine at the time: Osama bin Laden.

The self-serious mastermind provided a surprisingly playful connective tissue for a couple of hours of sketch comedy ridiculousness. You can’t argue with a scene that makes people laugh, or one that sits in silence. The event served its purpose, highlighting how much work we would need to make sense of that chaos, which probably came close to the amount of work it would take to track and kill the most infamous terrorist of our times.

Source 2: The Experts

You would think going to experts would provide the easiest, most effective path to improvement, but how do you choose those experts?

After working with a team of writers to squeeze out the bin Laden out of the sketch movie, re-inventing it as a much, much shorter television pilot. We held one final table read, which immediately confirmed the story and comedy worked. Even the actors smiled and howled at all the right place.

I felt so comfortable with the positive response, I shared it with a TV producer that offered to read something “when it’s ready.” You want ready? This show sings!

So, he read the script, and I got the feedback call on my way to work. That’s the one call that could not go to voicemail, so I answered, even though I probably should have been focusing on my upcoming freeway exit. He began with those magic words that make you instantly forget you’re driving 60 mph on the 405:

“If you’re going to call it a comedy, you might want to put some jokes in there.”

Good night everyone! You’ve been a great audience, and it’s been fun, but I must disappear from the earth now. Perhaps, some day you may find me warming up by a trash can fire deep in the forest preserve, but for now, I shall burst into literal vapor.

Luckily, I had heard my share of writer Q&A panels to know how to respond as a professional. At that moment, I may have been sailing through the guard rails in slow motion, flying over Sawtelle Avenue, and crashing into the Best Buy –- on the inside of my soul only, of course –- but on the outside, I thanked him for the helpful feedback.

He had enough iconic television series under his belt to make me question every choice since writing my first dumb comedy sketch in high school.

However, when he found out the actors laughed during the table read, he interrupted me, “Forget what I said. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” What? Are you kidding me? I’ve seen your house. The one with the shelf full of awards.

He told me the genuine reaction from the table read was a way better barometer of how the script was working than his quick read. So, my instincts were right. The show worked. I had to trust my own taste.

Source 3: Colleagues

While professional feedback feels like a right of passage, writing for a sketch team at the now permanently closed Improv Olympic West still stands out as a some of the most fun I ever had, since first deciding I would endeavor to make people laugh.

We wrote and re-wrote new sketches monthly, putting them up on stage, and letting the laughs and groans fall where they may.

One large benefit of the experience came from the weekly table reads of sketches. You had to churn out scenes with no time really to think too hard about it. After a single read-through, the team would either give enthusiastic notes to make it even better, or they would unceremoniously toss it in the trash with the swiftness of severed head falling from a guillotine.

A delightful skin-thickening and brain-sharpening good time!

By now, I’ve come to think of feedback more as a necessary tool for improving the script as an audience-pleaser, more than as a people-pleaser. Does the script have the intended effect? Only one way to find out.

Famous Last Words

My journey finds me at a point where I must get feedback from my producers on my multiverse dark comedy feature screenplay, entitled THIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE, before we officially pull the trigger on raising money for production.

Not only will the experience provide a sense of what last changes will help, but it can also give some feedback on the specifics of what themes can offer the opportunities for connecting with specific audiences. What will it reveal? Is it ready? Stay tuned.