I Hit My Goddamn Milestone For The First Time Ever, People

Well, I finished my outline. In a record-shattering three-and-a-half months.

The movie feels fast. And mischievous. And - thank goodness - solid. It has problems, it will always have problems, but this is definitely a movie and not a crumpled up sheet of paper in my trash bin.

Last night, I was up until three in the morning, talking to Huili about The New Hotness (this seems to be a recurring phrase in my life nowadays.) He gave me a conditonal greenlight, and I'm going into a first draft in January. That cheering you hear is that of the Rebels celebrating the escape of the first assault carrier.

The eternal question when you're writing a film is: will it cohere? Will all the disparate elements, characters, action sequences bouncing around in my head pull themselves together into a movie that actually works? You spend a lot of time paralyzed by this fear, and in order to overcome it, you think. And think some more. An outline is a way of recording your iterative thought processes as you fuss over every single detail in your head, attempting to align them in some semblance of coherent narrative.

Let me give you the context of this feat. My thesis script in film school took about six months to outline, and even then, the outline utterly failed in its purpose of, you know, outlining. I rushed (if it's possible to call turning in a script a year late "rushing") a very messy script to meet my graduation requirements, and that script now lives in a desk drawer, waiting for someone to blackmail me with it. My next script, the Last Whatever, was outlined piecemeal over the period of about a year, while I worked crunch hours at the video game company. The outline wasn't a failure, but it failed to capture the necessary moments of the completed script. I know this because I undertook a page-one rewrite after a year of working on it.

In other words, I suck at outlining. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Because I'm of the opinion that a movie that reads well as an outline or treatment, it will suck as a movie. Good outlines and treatments, unlike good movies, are simple and obvious in the way they move from point to point.

The suckiness of outlines and treatments (and of writing them) aside, you do need to have some idea of the shape of your movie before you sit down to write it. Screenwriting has a lot in common with architecture in that there are obligatory structures in a film, just as there are in a building. You may not know where the bathroom is located, nor what shade of paint it will have, but you know you must have one.