They say write what you know and a lot of authors out there write about characters who are writers. That part is not strange. What is strange is how these characters portray writing in books to a degree that makes me wonder: Am I the weird one? Do I just have a really strange writing journey that is outside of how most people operate?
I mean, yes, but also I don’t think it’s that far out of the ordinary.
There are some patterns I’ve noticed. This may just be in the books I read, and I need to read about more fictional writers, but this is what I’ve seen in a lot of the stories I come across.
They are in their 20s/30s and writing their very first book
This happening once in a while wouldn’t be that strange, but I keep coming across women 1Almost always women who have always wanted to write a book and are in a place where they can start doing that because of the plot. How is it always your first book? Did none of you spend late nights writing embarrassing self-insert fanfiction in high school? Maybe a pile of books you wrote nearly to completion? The most they have is half written manuscripts that never felt right to them and I do not understand it.
It is always a book
More minor, but there’s other fiction formats than a novel. You can write short stories. Poetry. Novellas. Weird anthology series. Hell, scripts for comics, games, television, or movies. 2Male characters are more often writing television and movie scripts, I will note. Books makes sense because that’s what the author writes, but these writers rarely ever even consider another format. That’s probably because of the next point.
Their first book will be published in the end
This is your first novel ever. I can excuse the plethora of writers in these stories who are also working in literary agencies who understand what agents are looking for and know the traditional publishing process intimately. These people know what sells and, even though their journey is always framed as a passion project, those writers could know how to write for publication. The rest of these writers, though, not all of you are getting a book deal out of your first foray.
It’s romance or literary
Let someone write hard scifi! Let them buy a sword for research into their fantasy world fight scenes! It’s because that is what the genre of the book they exist in is, 3I know, I really need to pay more attention to the genre tags on books before I pick them up but genre is never a consideration. Maybe there’s a thriller author in a thriller book, but that seems to be as close as things get. I finally read one book where the writer is writing a romance with a fantasy element, but that part is so quickly glossed over with none of the nonsense of spending days trying to build a magic system that makes sense before deciding this is a soft magic system so you can get back to writing already.
They are writing by hand
By. Hand. My hands hurt just reading about it. I remember several people over the years writing their Nano novels by hand and the cramping and hand pains they endured, plus the pens giving out at key moments of their stories. It’s not a bad exercise to try, and maybe as their first book it’s actually a good thing to make them have to type up their book after hand writing it as their first editing pass, but how are all of these characters getting these books done without a single hand cramp?
They don’t have other writing friends
This absolutely happens with some writers, but every time? I think in one book the love interest was also a writer, but they acted more as a rival, which is a shame. Long conversations about how to make different parts of a book work between writer characters could be such a fun way to explore character dynamics or even to include some foreshadowing. I mean, if you have a romance author trying to make the romance work, it could be an easy way to drop in some hints around how the third act break up is resolved in an opening scene, you know?
I write writers too
All of this to say I am not exempt from doing some of these things as well, but reading about it so often is making me think a lot harder about the writer characters I have. They are getting writer friends, diversifying their genres and formats, and some won’t be published at all. And I will be sure to make myself a bingo card for the next book I read with a writer in it.
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