/lit/ - Literature

>>12335464
I have a short film I need to make this year, and even though it is a film school project, I want it to be my true directorial debut.
And I'm really frustrated over the fact that I can't finish my script despite having already come up with so much stuff for this movie, for a bunch of reasons really but it mostly comes down to the issue that I want to, and feel like I have to, make something that heavily draws from the culture and setting of the country I live in, and yet I've never been genuinely invested in anything from my country to write about it, and I don't want to make something phony, derivative and disingenious that just uses culture as an exotic background. Plus the fact that I have to keep it under 30 minutes (otherwise the pitch won't be accepted), and that, no matter how hard I try to be respectful and inclusive to racial/social stuff, I will have to deal with annoying levels of uncontestable scrutiny for writing about a region from which I don't belong, is really putting me off.

I don't know but as someone who's starting to try and branch out as a screenwriter I always find it so much easier to just expand on the fanfics for media I like that I grew up writing about, and I shouldn't do that. I want to put my original ideas out there and express my vision but it's so goddamn frustrating that I can't do it. I want to get directly to the stories I want to tell with the characters I want to write about and skip the tiresome conventions or the necessary bits like world-building, internal/external conflicts, setting rules and just. And I know that's cheating and, frankly I like writing that stuff too. It's just that it feels so much harder to do it when I have to do it in script format when I'm used to prose.
And I have to finish it this month at least because the pitch happens in February and I have work to do and other stuff I really think I should be doing or wish I was doing instead.

That's how it is on this bitch of an Earth I guess