Before I start my post for the week, I want to give a shout out to my new friends with InkDrinks Halifax.  Who knew a three hour get together could turn into six so quickly.  I hope we can all do it again soon.

Now as promised from last week I will talk about script treatments.

I have not had much experience with treatments, they have been something I have avoided, not because they aren’t helpful, but because I struggled to write them.  But recently I decided to push through to the unknown and write a treatment.

A treatment is essentially an outline of your script, for a feature it is usually between 1 and 15 pages depending on how detailed you want or need the treatment to be.  But the function is the same.  The treatment details your story from the opening scene to the final shot and everything in between.  Every character, plot, subplot, location, theme, plot point.  If it’s in your story it’s in your treatment.

Now if your treatment is only 1 page long than this isn’t true.  Since you can’t condense the entire story into 1 page, you’ll have to only hit the major events, characters and plot points.  But this is why I recommend a treatment closer to 10 or 15 pages because it allows you enough room to write your entire story.

Because the whole point of a treatment is to see your whole story laid out before you.  It allows you to zoom in and see your story play out.  You can see what works and what doesn’t.  You can see if your characters act with the proper emotions or if the story is forcing an unrealistic plot driven emotion.  You can see what scenes you have fully developed and what scenes still need more development.

And by writing a treatment first you can avoid something called the snowball effect.  It isn’t as apparent in short scripts, but when editing a feature script, a small change will often cause a chain reaction leading to more and more changed later in the script which will lead to more and more changes again, just like a rolling snowball starts small and can end up larger.  When you have to make a lot of changes to a script, this will snowball into more and more changes to later portions of your script and this will make rewriting difficult and time consuming.  If you write a treatment before you write your script, you will hopefully find a lot of the problems with your story and characters beforehand.  And it’s easier to rewrite 10 pages than 90 pages.

And now we get to the part of writing a treatment that I struggle with.  The style.  Writing a treatment is often referred to as writing the script as a short story.  This is true in some sense and a lie in others.  Regular readers will remember that I am terrible at writing short stories, my style of writing doesn’t fit into the descriptive prose.  I am much better at scripts.  So I had to learn this the hard way, I had to just pull up my bootstraps and wad into the mess of writing a treatment.  And here’s what I learned:

1) Treatments use dialogue sparingly.
2) Treatments are allowed to talk about things that are not visual.
3) Treatments must be engaging.

Dialogue is a key part of short stories, but not treatments.  A treatment should not have dialogue in it, or if it does it has to be dialogue that is so strong it is justified as being the only dialogue used.  Treatments are descriptions of the scenes, of the actions of the characters.  They are not radio plays of the dialogue.

Since treatments don’t use dialogue and since they don’t delve deep enough into the story to show all of the subtleties of the character’s expressions, you have to find a way to show what your characters are feeling.  This is the part I have the most trouble with.  Because the rule in scripts is that you should evaluate each sentence and if you can’t create a visual out of the words, than you have to cut the sentence.  Film is visual so scripts have to visual.  For this reason a script doesn’t state a characters feelings, it doesn’t say what a character is thinking, it doesn’t state their hopes and dreams.  All of these things have to be expressed through body language and dialogue.  But in a treatment you can state these things.  You can say how the character feels and why they feel that way.  Like a short story you can reach into the character’s head and pull out their thoughts for the reader to see.

Finally, your treatment has to be engaging.  I mention this one because when you are writing an outline of everything that happens in your story, it can get really bland.  So don’t treat your treatment as an outline, treat it as a story all it’s own.  Make it interesting, bring in tension, make the reader want to know what happens next.  Use all the skills you have from script writing and apply them to your treatment.

All of this I state for your information.  I am not an avid treatment writer.  As I said, I struggle with the style and I would rather write the script because my treatments tend to be boring and unengaging and I get frustrated because I know that it is a problem with my ability to work within the format and not a problem with the story.  It is an inability to express my story properly and a treatment doesn’t do my story justice.  But for features it is something I am going to have to work on.  Because the amount of knowledge and insight into your story that you can learn from writing a treatment is invaluable and will save an untold amount of time in the rewrite.  But for shorts, I would rather write the first draft and do the necessary rewrites.  I am not against rewrites, I often do 8 or more drafts of a short before I can say it is finished.  If I wrote a treatment beforehand I may be able to knock off a couple drafts, but I am willing to make the rewrites so the story works out in the end.

So try writing a treatment, see if it works for you, and if it doesn’t then just make sure you have your own system that can provide you with the information needed to polish up your story and produce a script deserving of the film world.