Just Getting Rid of an Unplanned Idea

I've had a partially developed idea for a screenplay floating around in my gray matter for a few years now. It started off with a screenplay for a television writing class I took in college. The professor criticized it for not reading much like a television show and more like a stand alone short film. At least she didn't accuse me of ripping off some short-lived outdoor adventure show from the 1980s or early '90s that I'd never heard of. She did that to the guy who sat next to me and is exactly half of my male regular readers. We all laugh now, but she really sucked as a professor.

The script was about a small town southern boy just a notch up from white trash who'd knocked up a girl in high school and his struggle in deciding whether to grow up or keep going the way he was. I took the assignment as a pilot and saw plenty of places to take the story from the point of the guy deciding to man up and driving to his pregnant girlfriend's house, but that's all rather irrelevant more than five years since I've graduated with my degree. I just tend to hold onto minor slights and injustices so I can later metamorphose them into bitterly humorous monologues. I've got a ton of them. Want to hear the one about how I hate my high school best friend for making me feel academically mediocre? I didn't think so. It's a good one though.

Returning from that tangential commentary, I've often visualized different scenes for a movie based on that original script, especially in those moments where I'm alone, in that groove where the music flowing from the speakers, my stream of consciousness and the road are all that I concentrate on. That guy who once plagiarized a show he'd never seen once confused my driving groove with zoning out. It's not; it's that pseudo-meditative state brought on by a single minded concentration on one task (driving and not hitting or being hit) that allows the mind to be freed up from other extraneous processes. During these moments I can seethe camera shot from the driver's point of view as a less-than-new small pickup truck wanders the back roads of a rural setting much like where I grew up. Iron and Wine provides the aural texture as opening credits superimpose themselves over the scene of passing trailers, fields and scrub forests.

I described it as partially developed earlier because other than the part I wrote for that class, the rest of it is just mood, atmosphere, and thoughts unencoded into language. I do know that it'd be a lazyslow narrative that humanizes an American subculture that not even I really take seriously and gives emotional depth to characters who, in real life,are typically no deeper than the average American level of shallowness.But, really, what is fiction other than creating people who change, feel,understand, and make a difference like they never would in real life?

This post serves no real service other to work in a vaguely implied metaphor of something or other.