You don’t have to have a hide like an especially thick rhinoceros to be a screenwriter, but it helps

The perfect first draft of a screenplay doesn’t exist. If it did, and the producers and executives who read it had no notes, writers would finally be happy and well-slept. It’s just never going to happen. “No notes” – online slang for flawless – is a screenwriter dream that can’t ever come true.

At the Storyhouse screenwriting festival, at the Light House Cinema in Dublin last week, notes loomed large from opening act to end credits.

Aisling Bea outlined her fantasy of being the one genius who delivers an untouchable first draft. When she completed her first go-round on episode one of her Channel 4 comedy No Way Up, she assumed that was how it worked: “That’s it, done, on to episode two.”

The novelist turned screenwriter Courttia Newland also admitted that he was unaware of the sheer extent of the expected revisions. He wound up writing 27 drafts of the two episodes of the BBC anthology series Small Axe he wrote alongside its creator, Steve McQueen, eventually learning to enjoy each “fix”.

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Some notes are ruinous or ridiculous “bad notes”. One old compendium of these bears the delicious title A Martian Wouldn’t Say That! Others are wise “good notes” that save screenwriters from flops and pans. Still, writers being writers, both bad notes and good notes can be devastating to receive.

“The worst thing is a really good note coming in from someone you trust, and you know they’re right, but you know it’s weeks of work,” Bea said.

At the other extreme, Laurie Nunn, the creator of the Netflix series Sex Education, recalled a sliding door of a note that led to a bleak dearth of work.

Her show, which centred on a teen dispensing sex advice from a school toilet block, had been in development at Channel 4 for years when a new executive who “did not vibe with it at all” issued “this strange round of notes” telling Nunn to remove the advice element.

She walked away instead, then “deeply regretted that for two years, because I had no work”. Before Netflix intervened she was about to retrain as a therapist.

Notes felt “like daggers in the screen” when she started, and though she has since become “Teflon”, sometimes one will still come through that makes her “have to go and punch a pillow”.

As someone who lies awake regretting nomadic commas and vanished hyphens, I’m certain I couldn’t hack the process. But for aspiring screenwriters knocking on the door of this precarious industry, the horror of notes must fall into the category of nice problem to have.

Screenplays are, by definition, blueprints for collaboration. Turning them into finished works requires substantial sums of other people’s money. Notes from producers, producers’ bosses and assorted bankrollers are therefore both occupational hazard and marker of success.

This doesn’t alter the fact that the quality of the film and television we see depends on writers’ capacity to judge if they should embrace a note or do their best to deflect it.

“They might say things like, ‘Make the main character more sympathetic from the beginning,’ and you have to know better than to listen to that,” the writer and director Kenneth Lonergan, an Oscar winner for his original screenplay for Manchester by the Sea, said.

Personality issues come into play. “My advice on notes might not be any use to people who are naturally friendly, gregarious and open to other people’s thoughts,” the droll New Yorker suggested.

But people-pleasing isn’t always healthy either.

“I tend to be too obliging. I tend to err on the side of, ‘You’re probably right and I’m wrong’,” Peter Straughan, who wrote the screenplay for Conclave, said. Maybe that will change now he has an Oscar statuette in his study.

The worst notes, in Straughan’s experience, tend to come from studio executives, “because they just want to say something”.

For Nia DaCosta, who directed and co-wrote Disney’s The Marvels (a “learning curve”), notes reflect the trust, or lack of it, between the film-maker and the producer or studio. In the “really difficult” situation where a note boils down to a matter of taste, you have to be able to defend your taste, she said. Otherwise, why are you there?

Tom Sullivan, the writer-director of Arracht, offered one strategy for swerving the spectre of notes: “When you do stuff in Irish, people really leave you alone, because they don’t understand what the f**k is going on.”

The Mel Brooks approach – just say yes, then don’t do it – also attracted much optimistic love.

The clear message from Storyhouse was that you don’t have to have a hide like an especially thick rhinoceros to be a screenwriter, but it helps. As long as someone in a position of power believes there is such a thing as realistic Martian dialogue, it will be someone else’s gig to try to come up with it – until the Martians are commissioned to write their own stories, of course.