Writers Write About Writing

It is notorious that fiction, not least that fiction produced by Hollywood, rarely depicts work in a convincing way, even when the depiction is at the level of mere reference, never mind a much more detail-intensive dramatization. Whether the person we see is a lawyer or police officer, a journalist or a scientist--a tinker, tailor, soldier, spy--we can usually count on their job being depicted in a risibly false manner, and it is occasion for impressed comment when they do not depict it in a risibly false manner.

But it has always seemed to me that their false depiction of the writing life has been particularly egregious--because where most writers know nothing of those other jobs, they should know about the one they actually do, else their name would not ordinarily be in the credits of the movie or show we are looking at. Indeed, because they are themselves writers one would think that, like most other people, they would be irritated by how movies and TV get their job wrong--with this carrying over to how they present writers of print fiction, given that so many of those who write for TV and film have at least some experience of that endeavor.

However, they instead flog the same stale and profoundly misleading clichés.

There is the extreme simple-mindedness of their handling of the creative process--reflected in the trite references to "writer's block.

There is the way they gloss over the sheer hell that is the effort to publish what one has written.

There is the absence of any reference to revision and editing, and the wretchedness to which they so often reduce writers.

And of course, there are the endless scenes of "successful" authors smugly signing copies of their book for adoring fans.

All this should be the easier as so often the character who is a writer is that not because the plot really needs them to be one, but because writers rather lazily settle on that occupation for protagonists as simply "what they know"--allowing them to easily eschew the clichés, maybe provide a reference to the reality here and there. Alas, all this has proven far, far beyond them.