By the time I walked around the corner and saw Howard R. Cohen in front of me, I was frazzled. I’d had a long night working on my two treatments based on the Care Bears springboards had Jean approved. And then I did something I rarely do: I got up at six A.M. to finish writing the treatments.

I’d always been taught to do more than is expected of me – remember my father’s story about The Twenty Dollar Man and The Forty Dollar Man? It’s fifty-nine years later and I still do. Speed, along with talent, is an essential element in the runaway train world of television. I’m a fast writer, so I was determined to deliver and demonstrate that I had the added value of speed, along with talent.

Understand that story springboards can and should be short and to the point –

punchy and crafted to quickly gain the reader’s attention. Sometimes the best story springboards are a single sentence. If you read “It’s a Cinderella story about a washed up club fighter who gets a shot at the heavyweight championship of the gain the reader’s attention. Sometimes the best story springboards are a single sentence. If you read “It’s a Cinderella story about a washed up club fighter who gets a shot at the heavyweight championship of the world” or “It’s about a serial killer great white shark who attacks the same resort seaport village…over and over and over again” you immediately grasp the idea and, if you were a good studio acquisitions executive, you’d at least greenlight Sylvester Stallone or Peter Benchley to write the full treatment for Rocky or Jaws (and never mind that it only took Stallone three and a half days to write the whole screenplay for Rocky!)

But writing a full treatment is very different from writing a short story springboard and is, I think, worth two blog posts. So hang around and read on.