WRITING A TREATMENT

At the giant chess boards that decorate the forecourt of the State Library, a girl stands – puzzled – at the game of chess going on in front of her. It is just past noon and the forecourt bustles with students and tourists alike. It is just her luck that she is in front of the State Library – a place that is sure to have books on the topic of chess.

She steps into the library and is immediately overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books it has to offer. She doesn’t know where to even begin looking for the chess section. Unlike the busy forecourt, the library is silent and is occupied by very few people.

Once she finally discovers the section she is looking for, she scans her eyes across the range of books on chess the shelf has to offer. Each book differs in size and thickness and she doesn’t know which one she should begin with.

A book titled ‘The Joys of Chess’ stands out to her. With its cream-coloured cover, it seems non-threatening enough for a beginner like her. She pulls it out and proceeds to open it where she stands. Liking what she sees, she takes the book with her to the chess tables. There are men sitting at the other tables playing chess. She sits down at one of the empty tables.

Sitting in front of the untouched chess table, she begins to refer to the book. Opposite her, a girl in a yellow sweater sits down, wanting to play. Though this girl in a yellow sweater will be the first opponent she has ever played against, the girl accepts the challenge. She is confident because she has the book to refer to. They begin the game. Time passes and she is surprised to find that she hasn’t lost within the first five minutes. Though she is unsure if she will win the game, she finds joy in the fact that she has learned a new skill today and perhaps also made a new friend.

This piece of writing is a treatment written in response to a series of photos that are meant to tell a story. This is the first time I have ever attempted to write a treatment and I feel like I haven’t done it right. We were tasked to write this treatment relying only on our existing knowledge (or lack thereof) of treatment writing. I have to admit that I knew nothing about how to write one and resorted to Google to give me some sort of guide. Even then, I still found it hard to write. This was mostly due to the fact that, in my head, I knew that there were rules involved in writing a treatment and I wanted to know what they were. I’m sure this was the reason we were given this task before we were taught the rules – to make mistakes and learn from them – but my brain craved those constraints.

Personally, I think my treatment leans toward the literary side more than screenwriting. I ended up writing things that may not be able to be portrayed on screen. This includes sentences such as, ‘It is just her luck that she is in front of the State Library – a place that is sure to have books on the topic of chess.’ This probably is an unnecessary sentence but I added that in there because I felt like I hadn’t said enough about the photo. 

I was unsure if what is written in a treatment is confined to what one sees on screen or if it was an extended description of the scene. I referred to other treatments and found that they were very much focused on the action being seen. There is less description about the character’s internal goings on and more about what the character is doing and what the location looks like.

I looked at the the Star Wars treatment written by George Lucas and found it very succinct.

I shouldn’t worry so much about the amount of words I am writing but I think I had trouble with this treatment partially due to the quality of the photos. I chose my own group’s photos to write a treatment on and I found that the photos we took didn’t tell much of a story. There was obviously something being told in the images but they did not really follow the three act structure (or any story structure, really) which made it hard to write a treatment. It’s either this or the fact that I don’t have the skill to glean a story from a picture. It’s probably both.

I think the best way for me to learn about treatment writing is to take a look at more professionally written treatments and analyse their technique. Obviously, every writer has their own style of writing – we’ve covered this extensively in class – and sometimes the rules are broken. However, I’d like to know the rules before I completely make a mess of them.