Somebody’s got to write movies and TV shows—Hollywood’s dream factory doesn’t spontaneously create scripts (though, with AI coming, who knows what the future will bring…). And when the scribes of L.A. go on strike, as the Writers Guild of America may do very soon, the whole industry quakes.
So why is it so dang difficult to get actual writers to write about other writers in a realistic way?
As any author knows, the writing game takes years of trying, rewriting, editing, criticism, and maybe some drinking (lots of caffeinated beverages, if not something stronger). Except in the case of a few precious unicorns, success is usually far from instantaneous. And while it’s true that some depictions seem to acknowledge the challenges of being a writer, for the most part even well-made shows seem to side with fantasy over reality when it comes to portraying literary success. Below, I’ve taken a look at some fictional scribes from various TV and movies, and rated their writer-reality on a scale measuring relatively realistic (10) to unbelievably terrible (1) …and everything in between.
You (2018-)
The Story: In the show’s first season, Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) follows her dream of being a writer while being stalked/romanced by bookstore owner Joe (Penn Badgley).
Word Crimes: Beck (as she’s known) simply yearns to be a writer. She spends more time complaining about needing to find the time to write than actually writing. Also, she manages to produce single, perfect drafts and graduates from essays and a poem or two to cranking out an entire novel that scores her an agent, editor, and publishing deal all in a matter of months—plus, she earns the admiration of the New York press (so much for those long lead times!). Yet she still complains about not having time to write because now she’s invited to so many darn parties…
Reality Check: 3
The Son (2022)
The Story: A troubled high schooler (Zen McGrath) spirals into depression following the divorce of his parents and asks to live with his father (Hugh Jackman).
Word Crimes: Toward the end of the film, Dad is elated when his son, now thriving, shows up with a surprise: his newly published first book, Death Can Wait. The young man has kept this a complete secret from his family—until he hands the beautifully-designed hardback book over and his dad beams. Spoiler alert: This is all a dream—a fantasy conjured up in dad’s head. Without spoiling too much, this scene of (imagined) paternal pride is intended to drive home the central tragedy of the film—but actual writers will likely sigh with relief that they’re not being expected to swallow this nonsense. Of course there might be a few first-time young authors who come out of nowhere and are able to get a book published on their first go-round and also tell no one this is happening, but … nah. This was either going to be truly awful Hollywood writing or a dream, and for better or worse, it turns out to be the latter.
Reality Check: 4
Up Here (2023-)
The Story: Lindsay (Mae Whitman) leaves her fiancé on a whim to move to New York and falls for Miguel (Carlos Valdes), as the voices of people from her past regularly break into song in her head. (Well, it is a musical.)
Word Crimes: Lindsay writes one story and wins a prize for it. This then prompts her to ditch the guy she was going to marry and relocate because New York is “where all the writers are” and he knows nothing about the writing world. Once she gets to the big city, she learns that her prize amounts to $15 in store credit at an indie bookshop. This is pretty amusing (and again, it’s a musical comedy, so the premise is allowed to be a little wacky), but the idea of a writer operating in a complete bubble who shoots off a single story and gets any recognition—yet doesn’t possess the wherewithal to call ahead or find out anything about the prize itself ahead of time is …well, it’s not a great start.
Reality Check: 5
Younger (2015-2021)
The Story: A fortysomething single mom (Sutton Foster) pretends to be in her 20s and gets hired at Empirical Press to assist the marketing chief (Miriam Shor).
Word Crimes: There are pluses and minuses with Younger which, in a bit of departure from my other examples, focuses more on the publishing industry instead of an individual writer. Thus, the show is able to go a bit deeper and be more realistic when it comes to the timelines and actual facts of book publishing. But it’s also created by Darren Star, who gave us Carrie Bradshaw’s oh-so-not-very-realistic magazine writer in Sex and the City, so brace yourself. There’s a lot to recommend the show’s portrayal in terms of the vibe of the industry (doomy, gloomy), the notion that bad books can easily make the bestseller lists, the real passion for the written word that drives the best parts of the business. But then there’s that business meeting that takes place in the pool atop a New York City hotel, a book reading/signing where women pant over the author like he’s a lost Beatle, the suspiciously low number of editors at the press (and apparently only one agent who represents everybody), and the idea that a twenty-something editor would be running her own imprint is enough to make you wonder if this is alternate universe…
Reality Check: 5
Authors Anonymous (2014)
The Story: Hannah (Kaley Cuoco) joins a writers group full of unpublished, dysfunctional authors—and experiences overnight success.
Word Crimes: An aspiring author who really doesn’t even read, much yet write—who lands an agent, gets a book deal, and then is hired to turn that very first manuscript into a movie? By now, we know that’s fairly par for the course when it comes to Hollywood movies. But what saves this movie from being a complete crime against reality is that the protagonist is surrounded by the less-successful authors in her group: One gets a ton of rejection letters; one constantly records story ideas but never tries to develop his notes into anything more; one seems talented but suffers from writer’s block; one confidently self-publishes what he’s sure is the world’s next Tom Clancy-esque blockbuster. Those characters’ issues feel at least slightly more true to the experience of most working writers than stumbling into overnight superstardom, and we can totally empathize with them for resenting the hell out of Hannah’s surprise success.
Reality Check: 7
Wonder Boys (2000)
The Story: Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is a novelist and professor teaching creative writing at a university. His first novel was a huge success, but in the intervening years, he hasn’t gotten his act together to finish a second book.
Word Crimes: Leave it to an actual author to tell a somewhat more realistic story about… being an author. Michael Chabon wrote the novel the film is based on, and it’s easy to sympathize with the blocked one-time-success story who’s disappeared into his own head, self-soothing with pot while having an affair with his married boss. Overwriting (2,500 pages!) is almost as bad as writer’s block for an author, and when most of his long-labored-over manuscript blows out of an open car door and is lost … well, we’ve all had those moments when the world eats our magnum opus, one way or the other. It’s horrifying to imagine writing anything that long in the present day without using a computer to save your work (or at least keeping a back-up copy)—but at least by the end of the movie we’re reassured that Grady, working on a new book, has at last gone digital.
Reality Check: 8
Misery (1990)
The Story: Romance author Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is rescued from a horrible accident by his “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), who holds him hostage until he writes a new book that resurrects her favorite character.
Word Crimes: There’s no mistaking the fact that this is a horror story from Stephen King (with a screenplay by the great William Goldman, no less). And it’s hardly the first time King’s used the writing process to fuel our nightmares—see both the book and film versions of The Shining for the tale of a less successful writer. But the car accident, imprisonment, violence and leg-hobbling aside, Misery also delivers a kind of twisted adrenaline kick/wish-fulfillment scenario for writers. After all, fans as deeply devoted as Annie buy books! Multiple versions! Paul’s has nothing to do but write—no distractions, and no writer’s block here—in a cozy, secluded mountain home in Colorado, with someone attending to his every need. Turns out fear is a great motivator, at least in Paul’s case—and when he finishes the book, Annie’s even got champagne chilling for the celebration. Writers will both understand and inwardly cringe when Paul lights his newly completed manuscript on fire—and of course this was the movie that showed us that a typewriter can be more effective as a weapon than as a composition tool.
Reality Check: 9
***
These few prime examples aside, what are your favorite (or least favorite) examples of Hollywood’s attempts to tell the story of writers’ journeys? Let me know in the comments!
Randee Dawn is a Brooklyn-based entertainment journalist who scribbles about the glam world of entertainment by day, then spends her nights crafting wild worlds of fiction. Her debut novel, Tune in Tomorrow, about a fantastical TV reality show, published in 2022 (Solaris). She’s the co-editor of the anthology Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles, and has published numerous short stories and novellas of speculative fiction. She writes about the wacky world of show business for Variety, The Los Angeles Times and Today.co, is the co-author of The Law & Order: SVU Unofficial Companion, and curates/hosts Brooklyn’s Rooftop Reading series. Find out more at RandeeDawn.com.
Chuck Shirley, from Supernatural, who (realistically) was a slob living in his bathrobe while churning out novelizations of the life and times of the Winchester brothers all the while (less realistically) turned out to have a far different alter ego. Also gave us the timeless “Writing is hard” meme.
The common element is those are all visual media, which means there’s a whole creative team. The writer may well be ranked quite low on the pecking order: if this F. Scott Fitzgerald fellow is being obstreperous about whether or not various details are realistic, one can always fire him and replace him with a Robert Tasker.
That said, even writers in control of the entire process can portray their trade in sunnily optimistic ways. The entirely mundane (save for being set in exotic Canada) cartoon For Better or For Worse had a plot line that presented novel writing as “write drearily derivative CanLit first novel, sell first novel on first try, await arrival of dump truck full of hundred dollar bills to pour fortune onto front lawn.”
The SF-adjacent (in the sense author Westlake wrote SFF) A Likely Story details the genesis of a Christmas-themed coffee table book as it would have happened in 1985. Progress is impeded by the author’s counter-productively active love-life, the fact his editors keep being replaced, and (the one science fictiony aspect) his dreadful error in commissioning a piece from Isaac Asimov without making it clear only one piece was needed. A detail that surprised me on rereading: absence of computers in the process. I’d have thought by 1985 they’d have played more of a role. All very realistic, except I assume real authors would know better than to have an illicit affair with their current editor.
A surprisingly correct look at writing and deadlines is the very beginning of ROMANCING THE STONE. We see a visualization of the final moments of an historical romance, “The End” appears, and we see the disheveled writer who hasn’t really lifted her head from her keyboard for days. The house is a mess, and she’s out of cat food.
@1. Chuck/God as a failed writer obsessed with the Cain and Abel story (Sam & Dean) is really funny and scary. The episode about hero plot armor also hits the same note.
Actually, I also really like the opening of Romancing the Stone as a reasonably accurate depiction of going under to finish the latest WIP, then waking up and there’s nothing left in the house, which is a wreck. Maybe not the crying over the manuscript, but I don’t write romances.
In the borderline-fantasy “The Natural” (1984) Robert Duvall plays a sports journalist who can apparently during the course of a baseball game turn out print-ready copy while at the same time drawing editorial cartoons equally ready for publication.
I was annoyed by the ending of “You’ve Got Mail.” Not only does Ryan’s character “forgive” the Hanks character for dooming her mother’s bookstore with his bookstore chain, she also turns to writing her own children’s books as if that intent would naturally lead to publication and enough sales to count as career fulfillment. My thought was, The death of independent bookstores also makes it less likely that children’s books by non-celebrities will get published at all….
If it’s any consolation, movies and tv do just as badly, if not worse with musicians and composers. As does fiction too, not to mention music reviewers and others who write about music and those who create it, make it and play it.
There was a hilarious ongoing sub-plot in the (late-90s?) Post-Crisis Superman comics of Clark writing a novel (eventually adapted as a one-shot “Elseworlds” graphic novel, “Under A Yellow Sun”).
The funniest/saddest/most realistic part came a few years later, when Superman (while fighting an empathic alien bounty hunter) gets knocked through the front of a bookstore. . . and sees their whole stock of “Under A Yellow Sun” on the “Clearance” table. When he returns to the fight, the bounty hunter notes that he’s apparently succeeded in making Superman angry.
In the 1960s I wanted to grow up to be Jubal Harshaw.
60 years later I’m theoretically wiser now, but I STILL want to grow up to be Jubal Harshaw.
The “Writer Wrote One Hit Years Ago” trope in Wonder Boys was also used in an episode of Frasier. Frasier and his brother fawn over a famous, reclusive author who’s been befriended by their dad. They sneak a peek at his manuscript for a follow-up to his decades-past first novel. When they try to impress the writer by gushing about how much they loved the new work’s parallels to Dante, the writer says he didn’t realize it, calls himself a hack and destroys his manuscript.
If we’re including screenwriters: there was an episode of the TV series Frank’s Place where a famous director chose the eponymous restaurant as the setting for his next movie. All during the episode as they shoot the movie, a bumbling, nondescript guy keeps getting underfoot and told to move by the movie crew. Finally, Frank walks up to him and says “You’re the writer, aren’t you?”
On the more realistic side: YOUNG ADULT with Charlize Theron.
Movies tend to portray authors as either glamorous bestselling writers OR as unappreciated geniuses starving in garrets. YOUNG ADULT, on the other hand, is a blackly comic portrait of a struggling mid-list YA author trying to make a living.
The scene where she tries to talk up her new book to a bored bookstore clerk who couldn’t care less is excruciating in a good way. And adding injury to insult: the book is already on the remainder rack. :)
@5 – Robert Duvall’s sportswriter character in The Natural seems to be just a (possibly extreme) example of how journalists (as opposed to writers in general) are portrayed. Other examples include the portrayal of Wendell Smith in 49 and Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men — the bit about just sitting down at a typewriter and pounding out copy. Being as there are journalists, especially sportswriters, who are actually noted for their style, it’s particularly impressive if reflective of reality.
Paul Giamatti portrayed Miles, an unsuccessful writer, in the delightful Sideways. A copy of his massive manuscript, which he’s lugging around on what’s supposed to be a vacation, is a central prop in the narrative.
Quoth James Davis Nicoll: “A detail that surprised me on rereading: absence of computers in the process. I’d have thought by 1985 they’d have played more of a role.”
BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!
Sorry, but, um, no. The publishing industry was very slow to adopt new technology. When I was an editor in New York publishing in the mid-to-late 1990s, they were only just starting to acknowledge that computers weren’t a passing fad and maybe we should make better use of them? Cover designs were still being done on physical media with acetate sheets containing the words overlaid on the artwork when I started working for Byron Preiss in 1993 and it was a couple years before that finally started to become industry standard. And the notion of turning in a manuscript as anything other than a big pile of pieces of paper was foreign to most.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One of the (many) high points of freelancing for Bookspan was being the person who got to see the Donald Westlake books first. As was the custom, I got them as photocopied MSes (The Mystery Guild didn’t like mailing doc files). First Westlake MS I got looked a bit odd and it took me a while to work out why. The original had clearly been done on a typewriter, and because the force with which the keys hit the paper varied, probably a manual. No typos in the whole MS.
I don’t think there’s been a movie, TV program, or puppet show about cartooning that doesn’t show the cartoonist drawing a cartoon today that gets published tomorrow. Sometimes it’s even a key plot point. That’s true for editorial cartoonists, but the lead time for comic strips and comic books is several weeks to a year or more.
I can back up KRAD on how slowly mainstream publishing adopted computers. When I first started working at Arbor House/William Morrow back in 1987, nobody in Editorial had a computer. We all used fancy electronic typewriters, manuscripts arrived in the mail in jiffy bags, not via email, and, yes, editing and copyediting involved copious amounts of Post-Its and red pencils.
It wasn’t until I moved to Tor around 1990 that I found myself using a computer and email and all that crazy sci-fi tech. :)
@5, 15
To be fair, in the case of The Natural, Robert Duvall’s character has an agenda and wants to depict Redford’s character as a failed hero, so he would’ve had plenty of time to work on the cartoon with him striking out. Ditto for his sports column. He’d already written his career obit, pretty much.
On the TV side of the equation, of course, we have Jessica Fletcher and Rick Castle as examples of wholly unrealistic writing careers – see also (or more to the point, don’t see) “Robin Masters”, Thomas Magnum’s never-seen landlord in the original series.
Then again, there’s Tim McGee in NCIS, who published a bestselling thriller under a pen name very early in the series, but whose literary career has never been so much as mentioned again (except possibly in obscure fanfiction).
19: Wasn’t Ron Glass’ character on Barney Miller an aspiring author?
In CASTLE’s defense, aside from the whole business about him being fabulously successful and solving murders on the side, they got a lot of the publishing details right — including the long lead times, the various stages of production, etc. I recall the ep where somebody got an ARC of his upcoming book in order to read it months ahead of publication. And then there was the time when he showed up on the set of some new movie based on his work, expecting to be feted, only to discover that the lead actress barely knew who he was. “Oh, that’s right. There was a book . . . .”
She hadn’t read it, of course, but thought the screenplay (written by somebody else) was brilliant.
18. John C. Bunnell: McGee on NCIS being a bestselling author reminded me of another TV crime procedural author – Temperance Brennan on Bones is supposedly the wealthy bestselling author of the real universe Bones crime thriller novels, even though every episode hammers home how incapable she is in relating to “normal” people and is one of those stereotypical egghead types who will always say “phalanges” instead of fingers. I don’t think they ever show her interacting with the publishing world at all, beyond mentioning every once in a while that she really is also a famous author.
David Rossi on Criminal Minds was portrayed as being quite wealthy due to his true crime books about his previous stint in the BAU. I’m not sure if more of his fans who appeared on the show were serial killers or amateur profilers but I think his book signing would have been very stressful.
James Davis Nichols: Yep. Ron Glass’s character on BARNEY MILLER was indeed a would-be crime novelist. Can’t remember if he ever got published. Maybe in the series finale?
Jmat: I still remember the time on BONES when her publisher gave her a new car (!) as a bonus for hitting the bestseller list.
I got a fruit basket once. :)
Ron Glass’s Detective Harris was a published author. His novel Blood on the Badge was published during the run of the show. His use of his fellow detectives as character inspiration was the subject of an episode.
It was actually portrayed fairly realistically, including his not making a lot of money off it…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who is a massive Barney Miller fan
In fact, I remember that Ron Glass’s Detective Harris spent an entire episode whining about how he could no longer afford to rent a place in Manhattan and had to move to the Bronx “where the zoo is”.
Re: the transition in the 1980’s from typewriters to computers in terms of writing and publishing, I was in a research science department’s graduate program then, and it seemed to happen VERY quickly. In a manner of months, grad students went from writing dissertations and journal submissions using typewriters, to signing up for blocks of time overnight on our department’s administrative assistant’s single PC, to each small research group owning at least one Mac. Maybe my memory, maybe inherent love of scientists for new technology. I also remember the huge backpacks that fit those early Macs in case you owned your own and wanted to carry it around, LOL.
@26 – I wonder to what extent that transition from typewriters to computers in academia was due to the development of TeX, a typesetting system that came out of (computer science) academia.
RStreck: the transition to computers happened fast everywhere except publishing……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Mavis Gray (Charlize Theron) in “Young Adult” is pretty on point.
@13 Yep! In the early 2000s I worked in publishing and had to deal with a production team that insisted on print and still used pica rulers for everything. They didn’t even want to use email. And I still get editing clients who want me to edit on print using colored pencils.
@RStreck: you’re talking about creating a manuscript; krad is talking about turning a finished manuscript into a book. Certainly accessibility was a factor; I wrote at least ten thousand words about my experience running a division at the 1980 Worldcon — on one of the two minis at my job at a computer company, where we’d done an intermediate stage in turning text into publications. Individual authors may have adapted as economics allowed; I remember Silverberg leading a 1983 panel that might have been titled “I Love My Word Processor” (remember when you could get a machine that was almost useless for anything but text generation?), but ISTR Silverberg had been well-off for some time even then.
@0: I haven’t seen Up Here, but from what I’ve seen in fannish sources the just-got-lucky one-sale writer having no idea about economics is all too plausible. Luck does happen (although probably less often than it did when fewer people thought writing was easy money, leaving markets less crowded), and a first-time-lucky writer is less likely to have been exposed to all the good advice that’s scattered around the net (even if it’s sometimes shouted down by people looking for suckers who don’t know Yog’s Law).
More odd takes on publishing, courtesy of Hollywood:
IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS: Publisher hires private detective to track down bestselling author who is late delivering his new manuscript. Yeah, that happens all the time. :)
STRANGER THAN FICTION: Bestselling author is late delivering her book. Publisher hires her a personal assistant, at their expense. Come again?
WOLF: The editor-in-chief of a tony publishing house is out of the office for a few days (while recovering from a wolf bite). When he returns to work, he sequesters himself in his office and spends the full day editing a manuscript at his desk, without interruption. Seriously? In real life, there would a line of people outside his door wanting him to sign off contract requests, budget numbers, cover designs, etc. He would have a slew of phone calls to return from anxious authors and agents. There would be meetings and lunches and pre-meeting meetings. The idea that the editor-in-chief spends his whole day editing a manuscript, especially after having missed a few days, is the most fantastic part of the movie!
One I just watched again: the episode of Frasier where he and Niles lock themselves in a hotel room trying to write a book about siblings. It doesn’t go well. “YOU STOLE MY MOMMY!!!”
$15 in indie book store credit sounds about right for story sales in some markets *today*. (Duotrope lists them).
As for computers, I was writing on a Commodore 64 with Word Writer 3 till 1992, when we finally got our first Microsoft-based computer (it still took me a while to mentally get past the nine page limit Word Writer 3 had). I had made a reasonable amount of money typing student papers at a local college, but that was gone by the end of the 1980’s.
You forgot ‘Little Women’, where Jo seemingly gets published with the first novel she’s submitted—and gets $500 for it. Must be worth tens of thousands in today’s money.
Emma Roberts played a college grad trying to start a writing career in Adult World. She takes a job working in an adult video store to make ends meet. A good “small” movie.
@9 I’m pretty sure you can’t grow up and be Jubal. He’s worked very hard to avoid it.
@13 KRAD, not contradicting you, just asking because I don’t know, I get the INDUSTRY not adapting, but since the authors could have printed the books out & sent them is just liked typed pages were AUTHORS also as slow? Word processors with save features were around well before household desktops, even.
Which leads me in to…
@18, McGee’s career has been mentioned AND been a major plot point NUMEROUS times. My father literally spends several hours a day watching repeats of NCIS so I see them a lot & am steeped in it (I’m his full time caregiver). The novel got mentioned several times, Tim’s fame as an author & pen name were used to access an exclusive club, and part of the explanation for the delay in a 2nd book was that Tim insists on using an old typewriter & a fanatical fan was stealing his ribbons from the trash and using them to commit crimes (this was an entire episode). Just in the last few episodes this season he’s brought up working on a new book.
For the internal process of writing, *The Man Who Invented Christmas* is definitely one of my favorites. No computers in that one, either. :-)