Getting notes is the easy part. Every writer who has ever paid for coverage, swapped drafts with a friend, or sat through a development call has ended up in the same place: a document, or an inbox, or a page of scrawl, listing everything that is wrong with a script they have just spent a year on.
Then comes the part nobody teaches. You have eleven problems and one script. Where do you start?
Most writers start at the top of the list, or with whatever feels most fixable on a Tuesday evening. Both are the wrong answer, and both cost months.
Notes arrive as a list, which is a lie about their shape
A list has two properties, and a set of script notes has neither.
The first is that everything on a list is roughly equal. In notes, it never is. "The dialogue is a bit stiff in the diner scene" and "I was never clear what your protagonist actually wants" arrive as two bullet points of the same size, and they are not remotely the same size. One is an afternoon. The other means the script does not work yet.
The second is that list items are independent. You can buy the milk before or after the bread. Notes are not independent at all. They sit in a dependency chain, and the ones nearest the bottom of that chain change everything built on top of them.
This is the whole thing, so it is worth putting plainly:
Fix a line in a scene that a later structural pass deletes, and you did not do a small job badly. You did it for nothing.
Every writer who has polished dialogue for a fortnight and then cut the sequence knows this feeling. It is not a lack of discipline. It is a sequencing error, and it is entirely avoidable.
The five levels, from the ground up
Sort any set of notes and they fall into five layers. Each one sits on the one below it.
The foundation. Premise, stakes, and whose story this is. If a reader cannot tell you what the script is about in a sentence, or cannot say what happens if the protagonist fails, the problem is here. Notes at this level are rare in the sense that readers often do not phrase them directly. They come out as vagueness: "I liked it but I am not sure who it is for", or "it never quite grabbed me". That vagueness is the note.
The shape. Where the story turns, how long it takes to start, whether the middle holds, whether the ending is earned. Almost every serious note lands here. A sagging second act, a slow first twenty pages, a climax that arrives without having been set up.
The people. Whether the protagonist drives the story or is carried by it, whether the opposition is real, whether anybody wants anything badly enough to be interesting. Note that "the characters all sound the same" belongs here rather than with dialogue. Voice is not a line-writing problem. Two characters sound identical because they want the same thing, or because neither of them wants anything in particular, and no amount of rewriting their lines will fix that.
The scenes. Now that you know which scenes survive, each one has to earn its place. Enter later, leave earlier, stop having people say the thing they are feeling. Missing set-ups and pay-offs live here too.
The lines. Clunky dialogue, overwritten action, format, typos. Real work, genuinely worth doing, and completely wasted if done first.
Working the passes
Take your notes and put each one on a level. Then work upwards, one pass at a time, and finish each pass before starting the next.
Foundation work happens away from the pages. If your notes reach this level, do not open the script. Write down, in one sentence each, what the story is, what your protagonist wants, what stands in the way and what it costs them to fail. If you cannot, you have found the thing to solve, and you solve it on a notepad rather than in Final Draft. This is thinking work and it is slow, and writers avoid it because it does not feel like writing.
Structural work is destructive, so do it before you get attached. This is the pass where scenes get cut, merged, resequenced, or written from nothing. Go in expecting to lose material you like. It helps enormously to work from a list of scenes rather than the script itself, because a one-line summary is much easier to move around than four pages you are fond of.
Character work fills the shape you just settled. Once you know which scenes exist, you can ask what each person is doing in them and why. Doing this earlier means writing behaviour for a plot that no longer exists.
Scene work is where the craft shows. The standard advice, enter late and leave early, is standard because it is right. This is also the pass for the on-the-nose problem: find every line where someone announces their feelings, and cut it. The scene almost always survives, and usually improves.
Line work last, always. It is the only pass whose results nothing above can destroy, which is exactly why it goes at the end.
Sort your own notes
Tick the notes you were actually given and see them come back in order. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere.
Free tool
What should I fix first?
Tick every note you were given, in any order. You will get them back as a sequence of passes, with the ones that would waste your time held until last.
Two rules that save more time than the framework
Read the whole script between passes. Not the pages you changed, all of it. A structural fix moves the ground under scenes you never opened, and the only way to find the set-up you just orphaned is a straight read.
Act on the notes that repeat. One reader disliking your protagonist is information about that reader. Three readers stalling in the same ten pages is information about your script. And when notes contradict each other, they are usually describing the same weakness from opposite sides: "unlikeable" and "bland" are very often both a character who is not clearly wanting anything.
This is also the honest answer to a question worth asking before you spend money on feedback at all, whether that is coverage or competition entry fees. One read is a single opinion. What you want is the pattern.
Where this falls apart
The framework is not the hard part. Writers who have never seen it laid out still get to roughly the right order by instinct.
What actually breaks the process is more mundane. Your notes are in one window and your script is in another. You read a note about page 42, switch to the script, scroll to page 42, and by the time you get there you are holding a paraphrase of what you read. You do that four hundred times over a rewrite, and the notes quietly stop being consulted. Most writers end up rewriting from memory of their coverage rather than from the coverage itself.
Then you finish the draft and you cannot tell whether it worked. The only way to know is to go back through the same feedback loop that produced the notes, and by then it has been six weeks and the comparison is a feeling rather than a measurement.
This is the gap The PreList was built to close. The coverage that produces these notes, the ordered plan for working through them, and a proper screenplay editor all sit on the same page, so the notes are beside the pages while you rewrite rather than behind a tab. When the new draft is done you re-analyse it in a click and see what actually moved against the draft before it, by metric, rather than guessing.
The framework works whatever you write in. It just works considerably better when the notes have not gone missing by page 42. (Here is what that workspace actually looks like.)