What Is a Treatment, and Do You Need One?

A treatment is your whole story told as prose, in present tense, scene by scene, with no dialogue formatting and no screenplay conventions. It reads like a short story that happens to have every beat of the film in it.

Length varies enormously by purpose: two or three pages for a pitch, ten to thirty for a working development document, occasionally longer for a complex feature. The defining feature is not length, it is that it tells the entire story, ending included, in narrative prose.

What it is not

This is where most confusion lives, so let us separate the documents that keep getting called the same thing.

• Logline. One or two sentences. The premise. Covered in the previous post.
• Synopsis. Usually one page or less, often used for festival submissions and marketing. Tells the story compactly. Sometimes withholds the ending, depending on who is reading.
• Outline / beat sheet. A list. Bullet points or numbered beats, structural rather than atmospheric. A working tool, not something you hand to a financier.
• Treatment. Prose. Full story, full ending. Conveys tone as well as plot, because how it is written tells the reader what the film feels like.
• Scriptment. A hybrid with some scenes partly written out including dialogue. Rare, and mostly useful to the writer rather than to a reader.

The practical distinction: an outline tells you what happens, a treatment makes you feel what it will be like to watch.

What a treatment is actually for

Three genuinely different jobs, and they want different documents.

1. Working out the story before you write ninety pages. Prose is faster than screenplay format. You can restructure act two in an afternoon in a treatment; the same restructure in a finished script is a week. For a writer prone to writing beautiful scenes that go nowhere, a treatment is the cheapest possible place to discover the story does not work.

2. Getting other people aligned. A producer, a co-writer, a director you are writing for, a collaborator who needs to know what they are agreeing to. Nobody wants to read a 100 page script to find out whether they like the idea. Ten pages of prose they will read.

3. Selling it. Funders, competitions, and commissioners ask for treatments because they can assess twenty of them in the time it takes to read two scripts.

Notice these want different lengths and different levels of polish. A treatment for yourself can be scrappy. A treatment attached to a funding application is a writing sample, and it will be judged as prose regardless of what anyone claims.

How to write one

Start from your beats. Whatever structure work you have, get the sequence of events down first. The treatment is the prose expression of the structure, not a substitute for having one.

Write it scene by scene, in order, in the present tense. Each paragraph roughly one scene or sequence. Not every scene needs its own paragraph, but the reader should never lose track of where they are.

Describe what we see and hear. This is the discipline that makes treatments useful. If you cannot describe a beat in terms of what is on screen, you have not solved that beat yet. "She realises he has been lying" is not filmable. "She checks the drawer. The passport is gone." is.

Include the ending. A treatment that withholds the ending is not a treatment. Nobody can evaluate a story whose resolution is a mystery, and coyness reads as not having one.

Use dialogue sparingly and inline. A single line, in quotes, inside the prose, when it is genuinely the best way to convey a beat. Not formatted screenplay dialogue, and not much of it. If you find yourself writing pages of dialogue, you are writing the script, which is fine, but stop calling it a treatment.

Let the prose carry the tone. A horror treatment should be unsettling to read. A comedy should be funny on the page. This is not decoration, it is information the reader needs, and it is the main advantage a treatment has over an outline.

What to leave out

• Camera directions. Almost always. "We push in on her face" is occasionally justified for a genuinely important moment, but a treatment full of shot calls reads as inexperienced.
• Casting suggestions. It rarely helps and it invites disagreement about something irrelevant.
• Explanations of the theme. If the treatment needs a paragraph explaining what the film is about, the story is not doing it, and adding the paragraph does not fix the story.
• Every minor beat. A treatment is not the script compressed uniformly. Give weight to what matters and summarise the connective tissue.

Do you actually need one?

Honest answer: it depends on which of the three jobs above you have.

You probably do not need one if you are making a short film, you are directing your own script, nobody else needs to approve it, and you have a clear structure already. Write the script. A treatment for a nine minute film that you are financing yourself is often procrastination wearing a productive hat.

You probably do need one if any of these apply:

• Someone with money or authority has asked for one. This is not negotiable.
• You are co-writing, or writing for a director, and you need agreement before investing months.
• You are applying for funding, a lab, or a competition that requires it.
• You have written two drafts and the second act still does not work. Stepping back to prose is often the fastest way to see why.

The middle case, which is common: you are making a feature, self-funded, and nobody is asking. Here a short treatment is usually still worth the two days, because act two problems are much cheaper to find in ten pages than in ninety. But keep it for yourself and keep it rough. Do not polish a document nobody will read.

A realistic process

1. Get your beats down as a list. Ugly is fine.
2. Write the treatment straight through without editing. Speed matters, because momentum is what reveals whether the story pulls.
3. Leave it two days.
4. Read it as a reader, not as the writer. Where did you get bored? That is where the film is boring, and no amount of good dialogue will save that stretch later.
5. Fix the structure at this stage, in prose, while it is cheap.
6. Then write the script.

Step 4 is the whole point. A treatment is the only document where you can read your entire film in twenty minutes and feel its shape. Use it for that, and it earns its time. Write it because you feel you are supposed to, and it will not.

Next

That closes the development chapter's core documents. Next we move into the script itself, starting with the thing that makes a screenplay legible to a hundred different readers: format.