You leave the meeting annoyed. Someone said the midpoint doesn't work, or the protagonist is unlikable, or the ending feels rushed, and you don't buy it. The instinct is to defend the page or to cave and rewrite on command. Neither is the right first move. The right first move is figuring out what kind of note you actually received, because not all notes are the same species.
Every note is a data point, not a verdict
A note tells you two things at once: something a reader felt, and that reader's theory about why they felt it. The feeling is almost always real and almost always worth taking seriously. The theory is a guess, and guesses are wrong constantly, even from smart, experienced readers. If someone says "I got bored around page 40," that boredom happened. If they follow it with "because your protagonist needs a bigger goal," that is one possible fix among several, and it might not be the right one.
Writers new to feedback often argue with the feeling because it's uncomfortable, then quietly accept the fix because it sounds authoritative. Do the opposite. Trust the feeling, interrogate the fix.
Separate the diagnosis from the prescription
Before deciding whether to act on a note, split it into two questions.
Is the symptom confirmed by more than one person?
If two or three readers independently flag the same page or the same character as a problem, even if they describe it differently, that is a real pattern. If exactly one person in a group of six mentioned it, you have one data point, not a trend.
Does the proposed fix match your intention, or does it erase it?
Sometimes a note is really saying "this doesn't match the movie I expected," not "this doesn't work." A reader who wanted a warmer ending might call your bleak ending "unearned" when it is actually earned but simply not what they wanted. That distinction matters enormously and only you can make that call, because only you know what the piece is trying to do.
Questions to ask before you dismiss a note
- Did this note come with a specific page reference, or was it a general impression stated as fact?
- Would fixing this note make the script more like what I'm trying to write, or more like something safer and more generic?
- Is my resistance about the substance of the note, or about not wanting to do the rewrite it implies?
- If I removed this person's job title, credits, or confidence from the equation, would the note still hold up on the page?
That last question matters more than people admit. Writers groups have social dynamics. A note delivered forcefully by the most experienced person in the room carries weight that has nothing to do with whether it's correct.
How to get a real tiebreaker read
When you genuinely can't tell whether a note is a craft problem or a taste problem, the answer isn't to keep asking the same group and hoping for consensus. It's to get an independent read from someone with no stake in the original conversation, someone who doesn't know what was already said, and ideally someone who reads differently than the people who gave you the note.
A few realistic options, each with real tradeoffs:
| Option | Strength | Limitation |
|---|---|---|
| Second writers group or a trusted outside writer | Human judgment, understands craft and industry context | Slow to arrange, and brings its own taste and blind spots |
| Paid coverage service (WeScreenplay, Coverfly, ScriptReaderPro) | Structured, professional format, often benchmarked against market expectations | Costs money per script, turnaround is days not minutes, one reader's opinion again |
| Table read or staged reading | Surfaces dialogue and pacing problems that silent reading hides completely | Hard to organize, doesn't address structural questions on its own |
| AI persona feedback tool (Movie Mentors, or similar chat based tools) | Fast, cheap per use, and can put multiple distinct perspectives in one conversation so you see where they actually disagree | Not the real filmmaker, depth varies by how documented that figure is, can't replace hearing the scene performed |
The table read deserves more credit than it usually gets. A note like "the dialogue feels stiff" often only becomes obvious, or gets disproven, once actual voices are reading the lines out loud. Text based feedback, human or AI, misses this entirely.
Something like Movie Mentors is useful specifically for the tiebreaker moment, not as a replacement for your group. If your writers group is split, or if you suspect the note reflects one reader's taste more than a structural issue, putting the scene in front of two or three distinct personas built around different filmmakers can show you whether the objection is a genuine pattern or an outlier. If a mentor built on Aaron Sorkin's talkiness and a mentor built on Denis Villeneuve's visual restraint land on the same structural complaint from different angles, that's a real signal. If they disagree with each other and with your group, that tells you something too: the note is probably a matter of taste, and the decision is yours to make, not something to keep outsourcing.
When the group is right and you just don't want to hear it
Sometimes the honest answer is that the note is correct and the disagreement is really reluctance. A useful check: if you find yourself constructing an elaborate defense of the page rather than a simple counterargument, that's often a sign you know the note has teeth. Writers defend weak pages with long explanations and defend strong pages with short ones, because strong pages don't need much explaining.
What to actually do with the note
If the note is confirmed by more than one independent source and the fix aligns with your intention, take it. If it's a single opinion and conflicts with your intention, note it and move on, but write down why, because you might be wrong and want the record. If you're stuck between those two states, get one more read, ideally from a source structurally different from your original group, before you touch the page.
No feedback source, human group, paid coverage, or AI mentor chat, can tell you with certainty which note is correct. What they can do is help you see whether an objection is isolated or shared, which is usually enough information to make the call yourself.
Originally published at https://www.moviementors.ai/answers/writers-group-note-disagreement.html.
Written by the team behind Movie Mentors.
