Reader Question: How do you write a professional story treatment?

An open forum question from jonathan:

Hi Scott, great blog.

There’s lots of screenplays available online. I haven’t managed to find an equivalent resource for examples of treatments. There doesn’t seem to be too many pointers out there on how to write a good, exciting yet ‘professional’ treatment. Any advice would be great!

I’ve gone into this previously at various points of entry. There’ a discussion about a One-Sheet, general background re treatments, and a comparison of treatments and outlines.

Let me add a point. While many writers may consider writing a treatment to be… how shall I put it… a major pain-in-the-ass… there is at least one residual benefit you can get from the process:

You learn whether you know the story or not enough to start writing it.

Writing a treatment forces you to confront your story. Either you can wrangle the characters, plot, and ideas you’ve surfaced into some sort of coherent whole — or you can’t. If you can’t, then it’s probably a good indicator that you need to work some more on prepping your story.

If that logic doesn’t convince you, then what about the words of Ron Bass, one of the most successful screenwriters ever — at least in terms of box office results — with numerous hit movies including Rain Man (1988), Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), Dangerous Minds (1995), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), Stepmom (1998), and Snow Falling on Cedars (1999). Here is what Bass has to say on the subject:

“Everything I write is in three acts, and I actually start with three pieces of paper. I have some notion of where each act begins and ends before I get to this stage. I know my people and I know roughly about how many scenes each act should be. I start from the beginning and end of an act, working forwards and backwards toward the middle. I know that somewhere there’s going to be a moment of this, a moment of that, and it’s like a matrix. I don’t work with cards, just one page per act. When I finish three acts, I page budget. I want to know I can tell the story in a distance that’s appropriate. And I’m rarely more than ten pages off.”

Basically Bass doesn’t start writing a script until he can articulate the story in a 3-page treatment.

So yes, writing a treatment is basically a pain. But if you want to know if you’re ready to write a script, working up a treatment is an excellent way to find out.

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