Features "How To Write" Articles 10 Steps To A Great Treatment 10 Steps To A Great Treatment |
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The odds are high that your chosen script exec/producer/director will want to see a treatment before they will go anywhere near your screenplay. There are many different ways to write a treatment, but if you follow these 10 simple guidelines you can't go too far wrong... 1. Know Your AudienceBe sure you can answer this question. ‘Who’s going to be reading this thing?’ If you are submitting something to a specific director or producer, then make sure you’ve done your research. At the very least you need to have looked them up on IMDB.com, and ensured your pitch is at least in the same ballpark as the stuff they have already made. (Obviously people look around for new directions every now and then, but it’s just a waste of everyone’s time sending a pitch for, say, 'Porkies 19' into, say, a heavyweight political filmmaker. Or vice versa.) If you’re submitting to a production company but you don’t have a name to target, well, at the very least make sure that you have seen some of this company’s output. Different production companies tend to have very different in-house styles, and you can go a long way by tweaking your treatment to reflect that. 2. Get the Look of The Thing RightA4 in the UK, Letter in the US. White plain paper, black ink. No illustrations, no photos, no postcards - nothing but text. Get the basics down: the title, your name, your contact details and the logline or premise (one line summarising the story). In the US use Courier New 12 point double-spaced. In the UK use Arial 12 point, or Times New Roman 12 point. Don’t write scary looking big blocks of text. Or if you do, you’d better have a real ability with words. Don’t forget, yours could be the ninth or tenth submission the scriptreader has had to face after a very long day in an airless office. If it just doesn’t look right, you’re starting off at a big disadvantage. You may be lucky and have a stunning logline that they just can’t ignore, but if you’re the last one on the pile that day, will the script reader be willing to work with you? Nope, they will expect you to work with them. So find out what the production team wants – contact them or look on their website to see if they have guidelines. Use the spelling and grammar check button on your computer if you have to. Or get a friend who can spell or who knows grammar to read your treatment. And crucially, get the thing proofed. Which means at the very least that you print off a copy, take it away from the computer, and read it through with a red pen in your hand. It’s way too easy to overlook typos on screen. It’s better to get someone else to proof it if you can find a willing volunteer. 3. Keep It ShortPeople just don’t read long. 5 pages tops. 2 pages is best. Two pages’ worth is succinct, easy to read, easy to grasp and easy to convey to the next person. The script-reader may come across your work at the end of a very long day. Help them as much as you can. How do you get 90 or 120 pages of screenplay down to two pages? Keep telling the story, and then the story of the story. Pretend you are telling it to your friends. And then repeating it, and then repeating it. Each time you retell the story you will figure out a little more about what’s important and what it is saying and what needs to be included for it to make sense. Tell your friend the plot and get them to tell it back to you or to another friend. Like the children’s game Telephone or Broken Telephone in the US or Chinese Whispers in the UK, the story gets more and more simplified as it is retold. Writing a treatment is like writing a short story. A logline is the summary of that story. You are distilling it and redistilling it until it is the concentrated version of the bigger work. Continue this process to take it down to the single sentence logline, the very essence of the film. 4. Keep It Interesting.Don’t just write a list of what happens next. Abstract away, feel free to play with it a little. After you’ve told this story for the umpteenth time and the listener is still your friend and is still interested, get that down on paper. This could be your treatment. 5. Start With a HookGet the reader’s attention straightway. Intrigue them, make them want to read the next sentence and the next. Make them desperate to turn over the next page. But hook ’em from the start. Your opening can make or break the whole process. Journalists need to do this with everything they write. Newspapers arefull of stories, and there are plenty of choices. What makes you read the story: the headline, that opening sentence? And what makes you read the second paragraph? It’s because you want to know more. And what makes you read to the bottom of the story? Because it keeps you interested all the way through. It is relevant and keeps asking questions you want to know and answers them. But that opening sentence has to grab you. It is the essence of the story – ‘read this and if you have no time to read anymore, you will still know what the nub of the story is’. But if the sentence is too long or too complicated, your reader won’t even get that far. As a rule of thumb, news stories (speaking from a UK perspective here) open with a sentence not more than 25 words long. And if it can be said in 20 or fewer, so much the better. But that’s the hook. It sets up the rest of the article, and lets the reader know right away whether it is worth pursuing this story when there are plenty more on the page. The same is true of your treatment. Get that hook in the opening sentence, (or paragraph if you must). Knock ’em out with an image or idea that intrigues them and forces them to read on, despite the clock ticking way past leaving time. 6. Don’t Do DialogueLeave all speech out of your treatment. You might want to show off how zippy your dialogue is, or you might think the best way to get your point across is to give us what the characters say at that point. Don’t do it. Seriously. It’s just not done. Save it for the screenplay. 7. Write in The Active, PresentTenseWhen you're watching a film or TV show, it’s happening there and then, the story is unfolding right in front of you, it’s now. When you write your treatment you need to use the present tense to give your treatment that same feeling of immediacy.Never ever use the passive tense. (So that means always write ‘she does this’ rather than ‘this was done by her’.) Passive tense just kills the drama. (Mind you, it kills all writing, in my humble opinion.) Seek it out and eradicate wherever you find it. 8. Leave Out The SubplotsSubplots are by definition less important. Two pages is not enough space to set them up and explore them; get on with the main story. The reader wants a central conflict. If you can’t carry a central conflict for two pages of treatment, how is a screenplay going to last for 120 pages? 9. Write In GenreYou have written the funniest comedy yet to be made, so make sure your treatment makes the reader laugh. Similarly the treatment for your harrowing drama about the iniquities of life should move your reader close to tears. But don’t simply state what genre the film is and then plod on with your treatment. Your writing will demonstrate what it is. Don’t say, “this is a rom-com”; show it is with something like,“Holly’s speed-dating score sheet gets mixed up with the glamorous model’s.” Do not state, “this is a historical drama”. Instead try something like,“Germanicus leads his massed Legions into the forest as a thousand tribal brigands ready their spears.” If it’s horror, make it genuinely creepy. If it’s sci-fi make sure your treatment has a confidence about science and technology that shows you know what you are writing about - and is in tune with the film’s audience (but spare the complicated detail of how your teletransmogrificaportation device works). So, “A huge green monster, created when a test tube experiment gets cooked by mistake in a microwave oven” is not really going to get the script reader thinking, “Aha, the next Bladerunner.” But it might make them think, “Aha, a Sci Fi spoof. Just what we’re looking for.” Your treatment should have the same emotional connection that your screenplay does. 10. End The Thing
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