this is really hard

The end of the semester is rapidly approaching, which means the real world looks depressingly closer from this side of the first half of grad school. It also means that while I've already written what feels like a million pages this semester, I have about half a million more to write.

One thing that's proven to be a lot harder than I thought is writing my spec episode for Dexter. A spec, for the uninitiated, is basically a fake episode of an existing TV show that you use to show your abilities as a TV writer. While people do sometimes sell their spec episodes to TV series for production, more often it serves as a good writing sample that can help get you things like an agent or a TV staff writing job.

We're required to take either a comedy or drama spec class in order to graduate, and drama spec is a pre-requisite for the original dramatic pilot class, which I do very much want to take. Our teacher is wonderful, and is also the first female writing teacher I've had at USC, and she worked on Battlestar, which makes her cool. And I like Dexter a lot--in fact, watching almost every episode of the series has made me really appreciate it as an original and well-written show.

But goddam. Writing a spec is really friggin' hard and I do not like it.

Some people find working with a pre-existing world and set of characters to be easy and a lot of fun, which is I guess what makes them good TV writers. But I like creating that stuff myself, so for me trying to write someone else's world is roughly akin to some painful dental procedure.

I want to do a good job, because I like my teacher and have learned a lot from her, and because people who can get me jobs may actually read my spec. But I'm pretty sure it's the last one I will ever write.