Taking notes

Taking Notes
I just did a polish on a script. The generous producer took me to a fancy hotel and we hung out there and in bars, talking the shit out of the thing, going through it page by page. Fun and productive.
There is an art to taking notes. Lots of people will read your script and they will all have an opinion. Scripts are regarded as mutable, unlike prose works. They can always be made better. But it can get confusing reading all the notes - sometimes they seem vague, sometimes they contradict each other, sometimes they don't make sense.
But frustrating through the process is, it is usually valuable.
You'll learn where you have been clear - if someone hasn't understood something, you probably haven't explained it well enough. Defending points that you believe in gives you a much clearer idea of what your story is about.
The most useful working rules when dealing with notes is to remember that other people are, on the whole, good at finding problems and bad at finding solutions. A producer will give you a suggestion for a change and it is usually bad, but they are generally right in the sense that they have found a problem - even if they can't identify quite what it is. Your job is to see the problem that they think they are solving, and come up with a better solution.