Question: What is a treatment vs. an outline?

An Open Forum question from januaryfire:

Do you have a good definition of treatment and outline? I've seen these terms interchanged too many times. And the WGA website doesn't give explanations when registering. One instructor I had said that a treatment is 2/3 as long as a screenplay or about 60 pages; an outline is under 30. Just wondered what your working definition was. Thanks.

In my experience, the term "treatment" gets used in many different ways, everything from a 2-4 page story overview to a full-blown 40 page (or more) story summary. The latter is more 'official.' In fact, "treatment" is a designation for an actual deliverable per the WGA Minimum Basic Agreement (you can download a PDF of the 2008 MBA here) with the minimum payment for an "original treatment" ranging from $26,495 to $43,875.

My understanding is that treatments evolved into use in Hollywood when studios would hire a writer to craft a document that would detail how they would adapt a book or story into a screenplay, usually by telling a version of the story in narrative form.

As to specific page count, I don't think there are any hard and fast rules - it depends upon the request and needs as dictated by the buyer. If pushed, I'd say a treatment for a screenplay will probably be between 40-60 pages. However, I wrote a treatment for a 4-hour German language TV mini-series for director Wolfgang Petersen that was 31 pages long and he loved it.

An outline is different: That a writer does for him/herself. Thus there are no rules, only what the writer finds works for them. As opposed to a treatment, which is coherent and readable, an outline will usually only make sense to the writer because it is a short-hand version of the story, a scene-by-scene breakdown - from the opening scene step by step all the way through to the closing scene.

My outlines tend to be quite specific including not only scene location, characters involved in the scene, the point of the scene, what happens in the scene, but also any lines of dialogue that spring to mind during the brainstorming process, transitions in and out of the scene, possible subtext, how the scene ties into the story's Themeline - basically everything but the proverbial kitchen sink and typically in the 20-30 pages range. But every writer is different, so there is no hard and fast 'rule.'

For more on treatments, outlines, synopsis, and such, you might find this Writers Digest article helpful.