Planning a Novel, Part 3: The Treatment

The thrilling conclusion of my series at The Master's Artist.

Planning a novel isn't rocket science. In Part 1, I discussed the conceptual grid that gives structure to your novel, and in Part 2 we turned to the topic of pre-writing, which solidifies the story world in your imagination. Now, let's conclude with the step that brings them both together: writing a treatment of your novel.

What's a treatment, and why bother writing one? Think of a treatment as a dramatized summary. It's more than just a bare bones outline, but less than a fully-fledged novel. Imagine you're fast-forwarding through a movie, stopping for the highlights, or skimming a novel for class the night before the big test. A treatment is like that. It gives you the major contours and pulls you in just enough to give a glimpse of what the finished book will be like.

In his novel writing workshop, Daniel Stern, my mentor at the University of Houston, suggested writing a fifty-page treatment of the novel before beginning the first draft. I didn't take his advice at the time, because it just seemed too onerous to spend all that time writing and polishing a treatment when you could be working on the first fifty pages of the novel itself. But I've since learned that, despite my objections, Dan had a point. Writing a treatment before you begin accomplishes a number of things:

First, it lets you know whether you have a viable story on your hands. I don't know about you, but I've abandoned several projects in mid-course after realizing there just wasn't enough there. Either the story didn't keep my interest, or it was too predictable, or it wasn't as clever spelled out as it had seemed at the beginning. If you can't stick with the story long enough to produce a good treatment, you're not going to finish the manuscript. Better to know that up front, if you as me.

In addition, the treatment brings your plot into sharp focus, which means you can spot a sagging middle in advance. If plot is your strong point and you instinctively craft balanced, elegant story lines, this may not be important for you, but it's helped me tremendously. I tend to "get" the drama behind the beginning and end; it's the middle that gives me trouble. As I write my treatment, all the plot holes and convenient coincidences are starkly apparent, since there's no art to conceal them. I can spend a little time thinking them through in advance, rather than revising the manuscript after the fact.

The biggest advantage of a treatment, in my view, is that it gives you a chapter-by-chapter roadmap to the first draft, so you can focus on how to tell the story well, rather than figuring it out as you go. This is a little controversial, because many writers -- myself included -- enjoy the sense of discovery that comes from the first draft. Deciding everything in advance seems so ... sterile. This is why I avoided writing treatments for the longest time. I told myself it would rob the first draft of its spontaneity. What I've found, though, is that writing the dramatized treatment (as opposed to a raw outline) gives me twice the creative pleasure. In the treatment, I have the joy of discovering the shape of the narrative, and in writing the draft I'm free to discover the tone and color.

Contemplating the various levels of the story is one way to bring depth to your writing, but for most of us this doesn't happen until after the first draft is written, by which time there's inertia (and sometimes a deadline) preventing us from taking advantage of new insight. Think of how well you know your book after writing a draft and workshopping the whole thing as you revise. Now imagine having that level of intimacy in advance, before anyone else sees the book. That's what a treatment can do for you.

There are practical benefits, too, not lease of which is the fact that your treatment can do double-duty as the dreaded summary needed for your proposal. Everybody hates writing these things, because they feel like marketing drudge-work. But when the treatment is an organic part of your process, that changes.

After you've written your treatment, you'll have a good idea of what you need to know to finish the story -- and what you don't. That means you can target your research efforts. If, like me, you have a tendency to over-research, this is a valuable thing.

HOW TO TREAT A TREATMENT
So how do you write a treatment? I'll share some first-hand observations. Earlier, I mentioned fifty pages as a target length, but that number is obviously arbitrary. The idea is that the treatment should be lengthy enough to capture the essence of your story, complete with plot twists, theme, and character development. The scale of the finished manuscript will probably influence the length of the treatment. Odds are, you're not going to write fifty pages on a two-hundred page novel. There's no hard and fast rule, but you want your treatment to feel proportionate to the finished work.

My advice is that you treat the treatment as a genre of its own, something more than a short story and less than a novella. The more you tweak and polish it, the better you'll understand the novel you're about to write. Although I have no intention of letting one of my treatments see publication, as I write, I pretend the treatment is destined for print. It has to stand alone, to work on its own merit, while at the same time pointing to the larger (as yet nonexistent) book.

As you write your treatment, you draw on everything you learned during the pre-writing to start fleshing out the grid. I suggest that you divide the treatment into chapters, so that you can easily go back and use the relevant pages while writing the first draft. But I don't see the point in keeping scene divisions in place. Here's what works for me: I write the treatment a chapter at a time, but I don't worry about how to break the action into the predetermined number of scenes until I actually write the first draft. So even though I may have determined that each of my chapters will have ten short scenes, the chapters in the treatment consist of just one or two sections, as needed. This way, you don't lapse into "mere summary" mode. You're telling a story here, not filling in the blanks.

In each chapter, I focus on the character thread, the plot thread, and (to a lesser extent) the mood thread. Even though the treatment isn't fully dramatized, I include skeletal scenes and dialogue. Sometimes I pull back and take a wide-angle approach to the story (fast-forward), but when I need to, I zoom in for a fully-realized moment (play).

The real test of the treatment comes once it's finished, when you ask someone else to read it. You've succeeded if your reader is able to talk about plot and character coherently. If not, you'll at least know where improvements are needed.

Guess what? I'd estimate that about 80-90% of what workshop partners typically discuss about a manuscript is equally accessible via a good treatment. While I have no science to back this up, I bet that if you recorded two critiques -- one of the first draft and one of the treatment -- that the overlap would astonish you. Here's what that means: by workshopping your treatment, you can get valuable feedback in advance that will help you perfect the novel you're about to write. Something to think about.

NOW WHAT?
Let's take stock. You start planning your novel with a vague sense of the grid, then you plunge yourself into the pre-writing until the story world comes to life. After that, you write and polish a treatment of the novel, working out the high points of plot and character. The treatment is part of the pre-writing, but also its culmination. Once it's done, you know your story well enough to write an excellent first draft, without having to start and stop as you hit roadblocks.

There's no guarantee, of course, that a planned novel will be a great novel. Story is important, but storytelling is king. Planning gives you an advantage when it comes to writing a killer draft. You don't have to plan, but if you do, I hope you'll find the process I've outlined over the past few weeks beneficial. It's worked for me.

Comments

[Daniel S]

Thank you very much for writing this. It is very instructive.

[Sarah]

Extremely helpful, thank you.

[Elena]

Thanks, this is illuminating. I've just been working on a screenplay and realised the value of a treatment but never considered it for novel planning. Cheers!

[Deanne]

I did this post-novel writing because someone asked for one. Never heard of it so thank you for the helpful information! I'm actually glad I learned to do it even though it took nearly six hours. It lays out the pacing and plot much easier for me.

[Victoria]

Wasn't sure of how long my treatment should be so a rough guide of fifty pages is useful - thanks. And, of course, the idea of it standing alone as a piece of creative writing is a good guide for style as well as content.