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A treatment is essentially a prose-version of your story, from beginning to end.

Two tools writers use to help organize thoughts, and to accomplish and express this are treatments and outlines.

This process is called “ breaking story.” When your idea is solidified, you are going to figure out the beginning, middle, and end completely so you can work out any major plot problems before they arise. You will be spending a lot of time with whatever story you choose, and you will most likely have to fight through highs and lows. Now that you know what a screenplay looks and feels like, you need an idea for your movie. Let them do the heavy formatting lifting so you are free to focus on your story. You are welcome to mimic the format on your own, but there is no need to: word processors like Final Draft, Celtx, Movie Magic Screenwriter, and others are specially made for screenwriting, and have the format built in. You will notice that all scripts share a common format. The more scripts you read, the better you will be at picking out which are authentic, but a good starting place is on the library page at, where screenwriter John August has posted multiple versions of the scripts for his movies Big Fish, Go, The Nines, and others. To help you accomplish this, read screenplays of some of your favorite movies, or find screenplays of movies you are less familiar with, and read and watch simultaneously or back-to-back.Ī simple web search will point you to some online script databases, but you want to be sure that what you are reading are the movies’ actual screenplays and not simply transcripts. Before you begin writing your first screenplay, you should get an idea of how words translate from the page to the screen. When you are writing a screenplay, you are writing a movie.

Screenplays are not stand-alone pieces of literary material. In not much more than 100 pages, a screenwriter must clearly and succinctly present a coherent and gripping story, complete with rich characters and interesting dialogue and action, all while following standard screenplay format. Writing a screenplay is a large undertaking.