How to eat an elephant

I've made some personal decisions over the past week or so that I'd like to share here.

After going through a good bit of personal struggle, I've decided that I'm just going to give up writing fiction. There are reasons for this decision that I'm not going to go into right now, but it's the best way for me to go.

I'm going to concentrate on films now. For the next few months I'll be working on writing screenplays and treatments. During the next year or so I'm going to begin accumulating the equipment and software I'll need to start shooting and producing my own films.

Which means I'm about to get into directing, which is something I have no clue how to do. I'm going to start small, maybe shooting a short film or a music video or something, and hopefully work my way up to bigger stuff.

Until I start investing in this rather expensive new hobby, though, I'm going to educate myself as much as I can.

I've got a lot to learn. I don't have a great deal of time. Most people who get into this do so when they're a lot younger than me--most filmmakers at my age at least have a ton of short films under their belts by now. I'm going to take it a little at the time. I used to have a manager at my day job who was fond of saying, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at the time." Which means, even if the task is monumental, it can be done if you just break it down into smaller, more manageable, tasks.

For example--I'm working on a screenplay for a crime drama, and the plot is going to be a bit complicated. There's a mystery at the heart of the story and those are always tricky.

So, I started by breaking it down into broad, basic statements that outline each act. Then, I develop each of those a little more, giving a bit more info, and going into some detail about the ending. This is the treatment, and having the basic outline is very helpful. Just remember not to go into too much detail unless you must--you need to spell out the ending because that's what any producers who are interested in the project will want to see, but a lot of the smaller details of the plot can be referenced broadly or even omitted entirely.

To give you an example, here's my own outline for a movie I know you're familiar with, my personal all-time favorite, Alien:

• Act I: The commercial towing vehicle Nostromo lands on the planetoid LV-426 to investigate the origins of an alien radio transmission. One of the crew is infected with a parasite. Back on-board the ship, the parasite erupts from the crewmember and escapes onto the ship.
• Act II: the parasite has grown to enormous proportions, and it begins grabbing members of the crew and taking them away for reasons unknown.*
• Act III: Warrant Officer Ripley escapes the Nostromo using the emergency shuttle, and blows up the Nostromo in the process, after the creature kills the two other remaining crewmembers..
• Act IV: Unknown to Ripley, the parasite has taken refuge on the shuttle, too. She manages to expel it. She makes an entry into the shuttle's log before climbing into the stasis tube to go back to suspended animation and hope someone finds the shuttle.

See? Of course, there's a helluva a lot more than that, but this is a pretty decent summation, I think. Now you can take each act and expand it, giving more detail, working out the plot. It should be no more than a page or two when you're done. Then, you start writing the thing itself, where you finally start worrying about the details, but only for the particular piece you're doing.

Easy peasy, right? Well, it helps. I'll be taking the same approach toward learning my new hobby, directing, too. One bite at a time.

So, that's what's going to be eating up all my time and money over the foreseeable future.

*To get a pretty good idea what the xenomorph actually did to Dallas and Brett see Ridley Scott's 2003 director's cut. You owe it to yourself.