What I've been up to, staycation edition . . .

I took this week off because it just so happened a lot of personal crap came up that I had to deal with, all at the same time. I decided it would behoove me to take an entire week off.

One of my goals for this week (other than getting to the stuff I need to get to and doing what I need to do) is to apply for a writer's development program at a major movie studio.

As part of the applications process, they wanted a film treatment. If you're one of the imaginary people who actually reads this blog you've seen me talk about treatments before, and how I struggle with them.

Well, I really wanted to apply for this thing. Which means, I really needed to write this treatment.

Over the past month or so I've been hammering away on it without any luck. I finally Googled it, to see how other writers have handled it. I came across Kevin Williamson's treatment for Halloween: H2O. If you're curious about what a treatment is and how to do it, I suggest you take a look at it yourself. I found this inspiring and educational.

Before, when I tried a treatment, I sort of condensed every element of the story down to its bare essentials. Which is not really necessary, and is actually quite tedious and hard to read. All you need to spell out are the important beats in the story.

It's important that whoever reads the thing knows how you plan to set up the story, so you need to go into detail about the first act. The reader needs to know how you intend to resolve it, too, so you need to go into detail about the third act. The reader doesn't need to know all of the details about the second act. Detail the Big Picture stuff, like the major setback that almost always has to happen at the halfway point, or any other major plot points. You're writing a mystery and your protagonist eliminated several suspects? No real need to detail how those suspects were eliminated, if they were red herrings.

But the reader has to know how you intend to handle the big reveal at the end--how the hero figures out who the murderer is, for example. You also need to give an idea how you're going to wrap things up. The button at the end, before the credits roll, which is usually where your protagonist comes to a decision or realization about something important only to him or her that may only be peripheral to the main plot. So, you'll need to mention any subplots along the way that you'll be dealing with there, but don't go overboard about it.

This was a slow, laborious process for me, but in the end I think it was worth it. I chose to write the treatment about a project where I'd actually already attempted a script, and I just couldn't get it to work. The main problem I had was the ending, which felt contrived and forced. I just didn't have a way for things to click for my hero, for him to figure out who the killer is in a way that made sense.

Writing that treatment, though, sort of forced me to see it in a different way, and a solution that was there in front of me the whole time sort of trotted out in front and waved at me and finally got my attention.

Will I be selected to participate in this program I was applying for? I doubt it. They probably have thousands of applicants and I don't really think I'm what they're looking for anyway. So, even though I sat down and applied the other day and uploaded everything they were looking for, I doubt I'll ever hear anything from them.

But writing that treatment was all the payoff I needed, actually. It'll never be easy to do one, but now that I have a better idea as to what writing one entails I won't dread it quite as much. And I'll be writing more of them, now, because I now see how they can be so bloody useful.