12-Step Screenwriting: Week One - Idea, Concept and Story

I'm pleased to introduce the first regular episode of the Bitter Script Reader YouTube series!

This is the first chapter of a 12-part series designed to guide and motivate a writer to complete a screenplay within three months.  Recognizing that I had an opportunity to reach a new audience via YouTube, I decided to start with the basics.

This week's video covers the difference between idea, concept and story.  You wouldn't believe how those simple distinctions seem to elude many new writers.  You shouldn't start writing a script until you can say that what you're working on is a story.



As you can see, this is back-to-basics information, but hopefully some of you will take up the challenge of completing a screenplay alongside the weekly lessons in this series.  I've done my best to minimize the jargon here.  So later on we'll be talking things like Act Breaks and Climaxes, but I won't ask you to commit things like "Fun & Games" to memory.

I also won't pull the Writers Boot Camp stunt of introducing a lot of vocabulary that isn't common to the business.  The good news is that since I'm not charging for any of this, I don't have to go to ridiculous lengths to make it seem like the basics of screenwriting can only be understood by unlocking a Sphinx-like riddle.

As always, it really helps me out to see some engagement with these videos, so please click through to the YouTube page, Subscribe and leave a few comments there.  Feel free to embed these on your blogs, and if you find the tips useful, tweet about them or put the videos on your Facebook page.

I hope that in three months time, a lot of you will be reporting back with completed screenplays.

Reader question: mistakes on treatments

Escarondito asked:

What are some common mistakes that people make on treatments? And if you don't know that. What is the one thing that automatically when you see it in the first 10 pages of a script you already know it's over(their chances).

Well, I don't read many treatments, but I think there are two mistakes people are likely to make with treatments.

1) Not making them detailed enough - if they haven't produced a full breakdown of their story with all the plot twists and character arcs, the result might be a thin script with little depth. The idea is to come up with enough details so that your scenes don't come up woefully thin when written in script form. If you can, use the treatment to highlight how every scene provokes a change in the story and relates to the protagonist's arc.

2) Spending too much time on them - writing treatments can quickly become an exercise in killing time. You might convince yourself that doing all of this prewriting is saving you a headache in the long run. You'll spend months on the treatment, all under the claim that it's helping you write a better script, when all you're really doing is procrastinating. Prewriting is important, but there comes a time when you have to stop easing yourself into the cold pool that is the script and just dive in and get used to the water.

As for the second one, what can tell me in ten pages that a script is beyond saving?

- Bad formatting
- Terrible, terrible dialogue - especially bad exposition in dialogue
- An excessively long script. A script over 120 with more than one these problems is on shaky ground. ANY script over 130 will suck, and if your script is over 140 and you STILL submit it, you have a bright future in writing argumentative emails to me telling me I don't know what I'm talking about.
- More than one instance where an action paragraph is more than five lines long.
- Description of a main character's breasts or ass that is longer than the description of any of the other main characters.
- Any sort of extra materials like concept art, a CD to listen to, or a market research pack. ("No, really. I SWEAR there's a market for this!")

Oh, and if they do what this genius did. Just go read that entry. I can't do it justice with a summary.

Great question. Keep 'em coming, folks!

I must protest this shoddy treatment!

Time to dip into the mailbag again...

Your Royal Bitterness,

I've been reading your blog for advice for quite some time, however, I'm curious what kind of advice you have with regards to a well-polished synopsis. This is usually the first exhibition of a writer's story and I've found very little insight online as to what someone in your position looks for when reading a story in summary. It seems like the pitfall I keep running into is that without any sense of tone, a bare-bones description of a story can sound not just absurd, but kind of silly, especially in genres such as horror or science fiction. Anything you could do to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Kevin

Well Kevin, I assume you're asking about treatments, and I'd venture that the reason you've found little online is that treatments usually represent a very small percentage of what script readers read. If you're an established writer looking to get a buyer for your idea, odds are that if your treatment's looked it it's going to be by people at a higher level than me (a producer or director, for instance.) If you're not established in the industry, then querying with a treatment probably isn't going to get you anywhere. Aside from the rare exception now and then, scripts sell - not treatments and pitches.

Sidebar: Anyone out there know of any cases where a first-timer has made his first sale on a pitch rather than a spec?

But on the occasion that I do have to critique a treatment, I find it does often take a little more imagination. Over the years I think I've developed an innate sense of pacing, but reading the treatment gets a lot easier when the writer denotes the act breaks. This way, I can get a feel for how they're trying to pace the story and can say, "Um, I don't know if you'll be able to cram all this early exposition into the first twenty-five pages, and then there's no way that those next eight paragraphs of description will last for the entire second act."

I'm big on getting the structure right before you start writing the actual script, so I tend to hit hard on pacing, plot points, and the relationship between the main plot and the subplot. I also try to keep an eye on the main character arcs, taking note of how the characters are introduced, on how their actions end up pushing the plot forward, on if they lead the plot or if the plot leads them - and most of all, if there is a clear transformation in the character from the start to finish.

There's always the chance that flaws that aren't evident in the treatment will reveal themselves once the first draft is written. It's equally possible that other problems - lets say, some ham-fisted exposition - will feel more organic when woven into a scene rather than laid bare in a treatment.

At the end of the day, the treatment is the first look at the premise, the story and the character arcs. When I read a treatment, I'm looking to see if all of those (or at least most of them) grab my interest. Even though some scripts might be execution dependant, you can usually tell if a particular story will grab your fancy.

Let me put it this way - don't you make decisions about what movies to see based on little more than short reviews, TV commercials, or trailers - all of which represent a very small percentage of the actual film? It's kind of the same thing with treatments.

Keep the questions coming! Anyone else out there have a question they'd like answered?