Taking the "Treatment"

Someone in the film industry asked me to do a “pitch and a “treatment” for my novel, Horizons Past ( http://www.horizonspast.com ). He has a couple of ideas to try to get it into development as a movie. I had some notion of what a pitch is, but I’d never heard of a treatment. Fortunately, he gave me some examples and illustrations to follow. But I decided to buy Writing Treatments That Sell, by Kenneth Atchity and Chi-Li Wong to bone up on my assignment. After all, if I write one, I want it to sell, right?

My limited knowledge of pitches came from publishing rather than the silver screen. It has to do with a parlor game played at writer’s conferences, workshops, and seminars. In this game all the wannabee writers are given five minutes of face time with a real live agent or editor. We are instructed to bring a one-page synopsis, the first twenty pages of the manuscript, and to be armed with a pitch. This pitch must summarize my manuscript in twenty-five words or one sentence; whichever is shortest.

The pitch for a romance writer is doable. “They meet. They shag. They fight. They shag.”

Thrillers & crime genre might be done with knock-knock jokes:

Writer, “Knock, knock.”

Editor, “Who's there?”

Writer, “Etwaza.”

Editor, “ Etwaza who?”

Writer, “Etwaza dark and stormy night.”

Humor holds some promise. “Use the restroom before you read this, or else you’ll pee yourself laughing.”

But had I poured my soul into a genuine literary masterpiece, I’d think it offensive, having to summarize in one sentence, this plethora of fully developed characters I now love as my own family.

Fortunately, movie pitches can be several paragraphs. Ok, I can do that.

The treatment is something else entirely. First, what a treatment is not. A treatment cannot be – dare not be – a synopsis, slogging along from plot point to plot point. Instead it must be “a series of exciting scenes flashing before the reader in which the characters move and talk.” However, “Never use conversation in a Treatment.” Oh, Ok, but wait a minute. “ A sprinkling of conversation can help develop the characters – but use sparingly.”

Depending upon who you believe, a treatment must be between, “one to four pages,” four to eight pages,” or “one to twenty pages.” Stay focused, or else, you might slip out of the most present of all present tenses and fall into the valley of passive death.

It happened that another member of Daedelus, our writing group, and I turned in treatments at the same meeting. Of course the remaining members whose job it was to critique these two treatments, had never heard of a treatment either. They knew one thing for certain, however. One of these two treatments was wrong, because we'd used different “how to” books and produced diametrically opposite treatments.

I checked back with the person who gave me the “treatment.” He said to forget all those books and just tell the story as if I’m talking to a friend. Ok, I can do that.