Writers Can't Stop Writing About Writers

"Don't quit your day job" was good advice, actually

Recently, I watched Anatomy of a Fall after a friend recommended it. It was a good movie, although in the first scene it made me want to fall out a window because I saw my least-favorite trope repeated once again: the main character(s) are writers.

Of course, some people actually are writers and it’s OK if movies are about them sometimes. Take for example, Misery, where the entire premise relies on the main character being a writer (I can’t imagine anyone would hold a software engineer hostage after developing an obsession with their adept use of Databricks.) But we are at a point where if an alien came to Earth and watched a bunch of shows and movies, he’d think that at least 70% of the population were writers—and not just all types of writers, specifically writers of books or screenplays.

Take for example, the HBO drama The Affair, which centers a writer who is so famous for his novel that he’s recognized in public (although they had the decency to at least make him a teacher part-time, which was more realistic.) In A Simple Favor, one of the main characters is a tortured writer who is single-handedly providing for his family (although struggling to keep it going) as the writer of a single hit novel. The show Californication follows a middle-aged writer who is so famous for writing one novel that young sexy women throw themselves at him in public. Both romantic comedies How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Trainwreck feature magazine writers. There are many other examples- once you notice the trend you can’t stop noticing it.

There are writer-adjacent roles you see featured quite often, roles that you can basically imagine without having to do much research or actually work the job. One major example is “art gallery worker”, “artist” or “ad agency worker” which is featured in almost every romantic comedy. You almost never see movies about people who just so happen to work at car dealerships or at insurance companies. You could argue that’s because those jobs are boring, but anyone who has actually worked in those industries probably has relatable stories, because “working a boring job” is a nearly universal experience. There’s a reason people loved The Office or Parks and Recreation. You can tell these shows were written by people who have worked in an office environment at some point in their lives, which is why they’re good.

The obvious explanation is that writers write what they know, and what they know is being a writer. But I would argue that’s not a good thing. One thing I loved about Broad City was that Ilana worked for a scammy Groupon-style tech company. I’m a bit biased because I once worked for a similar company and it was funny to see my experience satirized. But also—how refreshing! It would have been so easy to make her an “aspiring screenplay writer” and call it a day. But instead, there was some genuine world-building going on, and we got some hilarious episodes about her workplace, including the infamous “dog hoodie” episode where Ilana attempts to adhere to her company’s dress code policy by wearing a…well, a hoodie made for dogs.

I’ve written books (some professionally, self-published and still on my laptop) and one of my main rules I set for myself is that none of the main characters are allowed to be writers. Making your main character a writer is often a lazy mechanism to give them “a job” that you don’t have to research very much. If your character is a writer, they don’t have to go to an office every day or clock into their laptops, and as a result you’re free to have them do basically anything. But constraints tend to create the most opportunity—imagine how boring The Office would be if, instead of being chained to Scranton, the characters were all writers free to jetset to Paris? What if Succession wasn’t about rich nepo babies working at a giant corporation and was instead about rich nepo babies whose trust funds enabled them to sit around in Bushwick coffee shops “writing” all day? Writing is fun for those of us who are actively doing it, but watching someone write—or even just listening to someone talk about what they’re writing— is mind-numbingly boring.

Not to mention unrealistic. I have met NYT bestsellers and they’re almost always teachers on the side. Even successful writers typically don’t make a lot of money, so I always do a major eye-roll when a character in a movie is single-handedly supporting a family because they wrote one book. Or even multiple books. Like, yes, Danielle Steel exists, but if you need to make your character wealthy and unburdened by job obligations, it might actually be more realistic to give that character a history of suing McDonald’s for finding planted toenails in their egg McMuffin. Don’t steal that idea, by the way—it’s the premise for my next dramatic novel.

I think what bothers me the most about the “writers writing about writers” trope is that writers are supposed to be the most creative people in the world, and yet, they continue to basically just write about themselves. There’s something to be said for writing what you know, but there’s also something to be said for expanding what you know. When I was little, I told my parents I wanted to be a novelist, and I hoped they would tell me this was a realistic goal and I should follow my dreams. Instead they told me that if I wanted to be a novelist it would be in my interest to work other jobs too, so I had stuff to write about other than “being a novelist.” And they were, unfortunately, right.

Following their advice, I made sure to have a career outside of writing (also, my writing made literally $0 for many years, and still doesn’t generate a real income, so…I won’t pretend this was some kind of noble pursuit.) I also made friends with strange people, attended strange parties (I derived a lot of inspiration from an annual Halloween party I would crash in San Francisco, which was hosted by some Great Gatsby-esque young Google employee and featured half-nude Burning Man attendees and a giant dining table covered in charceuterie.) When my husband and I traveled before kids, we entertain bizarre characters who strike up conversation, including a very bold French guy who we wound up discussing our infertility struggles with, who believed he could craque le code of why we weren’t conceiving. Of course, I didn’t do these things specifically to “get material,” they were either fun or necessary for other reasons…but the material is an upside.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be preaching to writers far more successful than I am about what to write about. After all, I have a Substack, not a movie. I have a Twitter account, not an award-winning book series. But I can’t help but feel that writers such as myself should be less represented in media. I don’t want to see any more writers. Please, give me a movie about a pharmacist, a club promoter, a shoe salesman. Get creative. That’s what writers are for!