How to Write a Script Treatment

Before The Script

For many writers, the desire to write the Great American Novel has been replaced by the desire to write the Great Hollywood Screenplay. Writing for the movies is already the subject of dozens, if not hundreds of books. You can search amazon.com for Linda Seger, William C. Martell, John Truby and scores of others whose books will take you from premise to finished script.

What many of them don't cover though, and something many new writers ask quite often, is how to write a treatment. Though the likelihood that you'd ever have to write one is rare, it does occasionally come up. Some years ago, I was a Hollywood Script Consultant. At times, writers asked if they could send me a treatment for evaluation of concept and structure. At other times, they were asked for a treatment from a producer, and were clueless as to how to proceed. They wanted to know if they had a story, characters, structure, etc. before they committed weeks/months and 120 pages to it. And I can tell a lot from a good treatment.

How You Can Write A Great Treatment

All the treatments I read are done the same way. Present tense; tell the story in a narrative with little or no dialogue. The number of pages varies so greatly that I couldn't offer a ballpark figure there.

The best treatments are those in which you eschew dry "this happens then that happens" and instead demonstrate your talent for weaving a good tale, still making it an enjoyable read. You tell a story that someone will enjoy reading, it's as simple as that. Make sure the basic ingredients are there, meaning the main and important secondary characters, the major beats of the story (structure is usually evident in them) and the major obstacles, reversals, barriers that affect those beats. Act Three and the climax have to be included. This is an account of what's involved in the story so it all has to be there.