"There’s a lesson in here for anyone who has a creative person in their life. I give notes for a couple of trusted friends, and I’ve learned that the worst thing you can do is impose yourself onto the work.
When giving notes, people tend to offer solutions: cut down the final act, set it on a submarine, blah blah blah.
No. Your job is to tell the artist or writer your personal, human reaction: I got bored two hours in, this character’s actions didn’t make sense to me. Then they can find their own solution. For instance, earlier this year I told a friend that I didn’t “get” the final act of a film and he sadly quoted back William Goldman’s rule to me: if you have an Act 3 problem, it’s really an Act 1 problem.
This also applies to editing journalism or books: saying “I don’t understand this” or “I think these sections are in the wrong order” and letting the author figure out their own solution is more useful than simply rewriting it to how you would have written it."