How to improve your writing on treatments

Writing treatments is an essential part of tv development. Ideas are easy — generated by the hundreds in conversation, like infantry soldiers they pop their heads over the ramparts to be shot down by commissioning editors. What gives an idea the best chance of survival is something clearly expressed and well written. Better still if that idea can be neatly expressed in as few words as possible.

Something that is worth practising is the art of the top line — how do you grab the attention of the commissioning editor who will probably only read the first few paragraphs, maybe even the first few lines, of your otherwise carefully crafted all singing, all dancing nine page document?

Eight British teen tearaways are locked up in one of America’s toughest jails in a bid to help them mend their ways. Will their brutal life on the inside change their life on the outside?

This is a typical top line — it tells you exactly what the documentary is about, it encourages images of young people transplanted from one culture to another, tough American prisons full of brutal characters, we’ll see unruly teens and worried parents and most importantly it demonstrates the purpose of the documentary in a neat balanced sentence — will the experience help alter attitudes for the better? This is the kind of top line that would catch my attention if someone e-mailed it to me as an idea.

So a first exercise might be watching a tv programme and summing it up in your own words. Try that for a week. Everything you watch, be it an episode of Country File to an Attenborough epic, a BBC Four mind-bend to a Channel Four shock doc. Summarise in the first sentence what it is about and why do it in the second, what’s the hook, what’s the thing that will engage an audience?

What might also be useful is to read the summaries of tv shows in magazine and newspaper listings, reviews in Sunday supplement magazines and online. The more you read short, sharp summaries and opinions expressed about how good or bad in three lines or less, the more this will encourage shorter sharper writing.

The next thing to think about is the audience, who are you writing for? Are you trying to persuade, to entertain, to shock, to thrill, to intrigue, to explain…? A blog for next time…..

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