Most people hate writing them because they find them difficult - one my clients compared them to 'drawing teeth'. Others run a mile from them because they feel they interfere with their creativity. Yet others think they're a hideous waste of time and effort.
But the treatment or outline of a longer ie. book-length piece of writing (also known as a synopsis or summary) is becoming vital. Not just as your selling document but, as my agent describes it, 'the sizzle' that will tempt publisher or producer to check out the steak that is your completed work.
The treatment provides not only the meat of your book but gives a flavour of the way you will deal with content, what the style might be, how you write and if you're capable of structuring your material to its best advantage.
All that remains then, is the detail: voice is all-important as are dialogue and the ability to make your narrative alive and vital so that readers/viewers become participants in your protagonists' lives and not mere bystanders.
Increasingly, I'm finding that when I'm working with projects in development, the most constructive and thorough approach is to work with the treatment. Working with a short document that outlines the story, makes the work digestible. We can get stuck into structure and character with rigour and really get down to vital but often invisible or subtle elements such as the underlying urges and needs of characters, twists and turns, dramatic reversals. We try to think in scenes to convey these elements; we see cause and effect in action, we conjure up events, locales, inner fears and memories in concrete ways.
Once these are in place in a document packed into something between three to ten pages, the longer piece pretty much writes itself.
I'd love to know what all of you think about the treatment or synopsis. Do you agree with this blog? Or do you have reservations? Do you write outlines or do you plunge right in?
And don't forget to check out what the very successful writers in the interviews section think about it.
