The Case for Outlining

Whenever I start a long-term project in earnest—be it a feature film, novel, or bank heist —I begin to embody it in various ways. Or, more specificually, the work reflects existing embodied phenomena in my life—like the werewolf in my most recent film, inspired by the weird hairs and haggardedness of middle age.

Now, I’m headlong into a long-simmering project that I’ve mulled in various incarnations for the past two decades. The Press Club is in many ways the unified field theory of my career as both a journo and filmmaker… (Would you believe that making documentaries never occurred to me until writing this very sentence? Shit.) Thus far, I’ve resisted crossing the streams of journalism and filmmaking because I know, instinctively, that a poorly executed result would destroy any going proposition in either—and likely me in the process. 

This is why I outline.

For me, it starts with genre—I need the broad contours of convention in which to project my weird notions lest they become too unw…