I'm attempting to write an entire feature spec script in the next two weeks. The way I plan to do this is by making the script semi-autobiographical. It's not actually auto-biographical, but I fill in all the blanks with myself. It begins with a liberal, pot-smoking, novel-writing, agnostic, and bored out of his mind intellectual college student returning to his conservative Christian home after his antics get him kicked out of school. At first he considers his new situation as just another speed bump in his path to regaining his freedom and becoming a famous writer. However, he loses the motivation and ability to write and as he unsuccessfully applies to other schools, soon realizes that his stint at home isn't so much a temporary inconvenience as it is a permanent change he is going to have to adapt to. He keeps getting notes back on his stories, telling him his crimes are incredibly detailed but his characters lack motivation. He needs to try to find empathy to make the characters believable, but he can't. He begins trying to find ways to connect with the community he always hated, and even makes friends with some of the people he never spoke to when in high school. When his path leads him to spend time with the girl he had a crush on in high school, he suddenly realizes that he is dealing with many of the issues that he has carried with him since he left home. While in high school, he liked her because of theoretical things that they had in common (and him building her up to be what she wasn't), their shared experience in failing to fulfill their ambitious goals (she wanted to go to an Ivy League school to study business) is ultimately what brings them together. They both wanted to break free of their home, and it is exactly where they have wound up once again.
There's a bit in there about him being a master thief with an unshakeable moral conviction against stealing. In high school, while other people did extra-curricular activities and had social lives, he would break into and sneak around buildings like his school and leave notes on expensive equipment explaining how he could have stolen it. Unable to figure out a way to align his talent with his moral upbringing (which he claims would keep him from finding satisfaction even if he tried to shed it and just become a thief), he ultimately decided to write crime novels. While in college, he continued his streak of finding ways to beat the system and rebel. That is ultimately what gets him kicked out of college. Finally caught, his actions (and abysmal GPA) come as a surprise to his parents (who always assumed he was the perfect child he carefully allowed them to think he was). As the story progresses, and he sees his parents aren't the ignorant slaves to doctrine he thought they were (and that his own view on life and reaction to his boredom has kept him from seeing the ways he could be making a difference in the world around him), he starts letting lose and refusing to live two lives. While his parents may never understand him, he develops a working relationship with them (and stops lying to them. I'm trying to work on a cute way to acknowledge they know they are speaking to the real him and not the him that he always made them think he was). There's also a bit I'm working on with a gang that represents him overcoming his past, and the climax of the movie is them chasing him down and him losing them in one of the buildings he used to frequent as an amateur burglar. Only once he realizes that living is better than writing (and he doesn't have to hide who he was born to be or give up who he was raised to be) and seizes opportunities where they are presented to him, rather trying to force them where he wants them to be, does he come to learn empathy and actually write a successful book and move on to the next stage in his life.
It's a work in progress. It's quirky, a little idealistic and mostly a fairy tale. It's simple, but my thoughts of late have been pretty simple. I'm thinking of going the oddball Wes Anderson comedy route with it.
