Editing Your Movie Treatment

Sometimes it's what you don't say that says it all.

This is one of those lessons I am still trying to get the hang of myself, both in writing and in life and in my writing life.

I'm open-hearted and a blabber.  These two qualities rarely, if ever, pay off.

But, I will save you the "open mouth insert foot" story that I just experienced today and move right on to writing tips.

So, here's what I have to say about saying too much.  Don't.  Especially when writing a movie treatment let the action speak for itself.

What I found in my own treatment writing is that often I write the response to a line of necessary dialogue with a completely unnecessary answer.  Or I sometimes follow a description of action with a line of explanation about that action.

For example, if I just described the scene where the wife leaves her husband including really spicy dialogue that shows that she's given more than she ever thought she had to give, I do NOT need to add a line saying anything remotely about her physically leaving or her mental state.  It's in the scene.  They are done.  She's out.  Move on to the next beat.

We tend to do these extra and unnecessary bits because after writing two pages scenes, we just don't trust the short paragraphs of a treatment.

But adding explanations just slows your story down to a boring (I'm not going to buy you) crawl.

Instead, make sure the action and dialogue speak for themselves and leave the reader to fill in the blanks on their own.  Trust that they will draw the conclusion that you intended them to and don't explain.   That's the trick to getting someone really hooked.  You let them use their own imagination in the carefully constructed open spaces you leave by not over-writing.

If something is unclear - then work harder to make the action and dialogue clear.  Again, explaining poor writing just makes the poor writing longer.

Try this trick.  After you've finished your first draft of a treatment read the last line of each paragraph.  I bet you find some cuts that you won't even miss once they are gone.

Happy writing!