Most Writers Are Writers

aka: Writers Are Writers

"Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to Write What You Know, which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery."

— Joe Haldeman

You don't say?

Seriously, though. In fiction, it is relatively common for the main character to be a writer or a reporter. This is in large part because many narrative works of art are initially driven by writers themselves (novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, etc.)

Interestingly, such characters are only occasionally Author Avatars. As the page quote indicates, one of the main pieces of advice writers hear is "Write What You Know", and since, as writers, they know writing, they have some idea of how a writer would react in a given situation. This trope is almost unavoidable when the setting revolves around a Show Within a Show and may lead to a Writer's Block Montage. Making characters who are writers by trade has a number of advantages for a narrative:

• It helps get past the whole Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic problem, since a writer would be expected to know how to use big, fancy words.
• Journalists and other kinds of nonfiction writers generally are expected to have investigative skills and an attention to detail that are useful to many kinds of plots, such as crime-solving.
• Even if they don't use those skills in the plot, journalists are generally close to a wide variety of local important people like politicians and big events like disasters, but not actually one of those people or part of those events. This is the in-universe reason why Superman and Spider-Man went into journalism in the first place: so they could keep their ears to the ground and find out when and where superheroes are needed.
• Freelance writers and journalists have a semi-plausible excuse for their One-Hour Work Week.
• Fiction writers in-universe, because of that same "write what you know" principle, can theoretically have every Chekhov's Skill an amateur could plausibly have if they had researched it for a book.
• However, writers who don't write also don't get paid, which means this can become One-Hour Work Week if the writer never actually gets around to doing any writing, or if they spend too much time doing something other than writing. In a one-off story, this can be handwaved on the basis that the character can always write a book about precisely the adventures they just experienced.

This can tie into the Framing Device, particularly if the story is written in the first person, i.e. the writer protagonist had an adventure, wrote up his account of it, published it, and this is supposedly the book you have just read.

As a corollary to this, there are a disproportionate number of movies about the movie industry, a disproportionate number of plays about actors and playwrights, a disproportionate number of songs about singers, and so on. Comic book authors similarly have the tendency to include the Sequential Artist. It is also probably why so many books praise the idea of reading books while suspiciously eyeing other forms of media.

Particularly clever or cynical writers have also been known to invoke a little Creator Career Self-Deprecation and write stories in which Writers Suck.

Super-Trope of "How I Wrote This Article" Article, which is writing about not knowing what to write anymore, and Writer's Block Montage. For characters who only become writers once they have some interesting stories to tell, see I Should Write a Book About This.

See also Most Writers Are Male and Most Writers Are Human. Compare and contrast Self-Insert Fic.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Sumiregawa Nenene of Read or Die.
• There's also a number of manga about making manga, or at least doujin: Genshiken, Comic Party, Doujin Work, Bakuman。, Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, The Unpopular Mangaka and the Helpful Onryo-san, Ah... and Mm... Are All She Says...
• Manga that contain characters that are writers are also plentiful: School Rumble, Naruto, Junjou Romantica, Kodocha, Otaku no Musume-san and Fairy Tail.
• In Strawberry Marshmallow, Miu tries her hand at being a writer of manga, but her works are a bit surreal for Chika.
• Bakuman。 is a manga about manga, with the main characters being a manga artist and author, and is coincidentally produced by a writer and an author as separate people.
• Himeko's mother from Hime-chan's Ribbon is a writer of young women's romance novels who often takes ideas from the real world into her stories, with little changes.
• Galaxy Express 999 does this several times. At one point, a poor person Tetsuro meets is a would-be anime creator (who we are told, did manage to get her anime created), and episode 58 features a ghost who was a would-be manga writer in life. Episodes 60-61 have another would-be manga artist, and another one shows up in episode 101. And 111 too.
• Sai Nanohana, father to Jubei-chan, popular writer of samurai period pulp, and Author Avatar.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable introduces the famed mangaka Kishibe Rohan, whose Stand lets him read and write into people like they are books. He shares many personality quirks with Hirohiko Araki, such as doing lots of research and preferring to experience things hands-on before writing them into their works. Rohan would later become the protagonist of multiple Spin-Off series, including the Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan series.
• Fairy Tail has Supporting Protagonist Lucy who has spent much of the series writing a book. The trope is even played with when she tries to trick a villain by saying she needs to go the bathroom. The villain has prepared for such a cheap trick and shows Lucy a bucket that she may use instead of a toilet. Lucy pretends that she is actually going to use the bucket. The villain is embarrassed and looks the other way, and Lucy uses the opportunity to kick him in the crotch. She then notes that despite the bathroom trick being one of the oldest ones in the book, it actually worked and that she might use it in her own novel.
• Daily Lives of High School Boys have the "literature girl," who wrote a Romance Novel... and then trying to re-enact the scene herself.
• Sae of Hidamari Sketch is a seventeen-year-old who's already writing commercially.
• Wakanae Sora of Family Compo is a manga artist, who seems to specialize in manly action stories if the covers of Our Emblem are anything to go by.
• Yuuki Rito's father in To Love Ru is a manga artist who rarely sees his children because he's constantly on deadline. The bodyguard/chief enforcer of an intergalactic warlord becomes Mr Yuuki's assistant. Somehow.
• Nitori from Wandering Son shows a knack for writing throughout the series, typically being the one to write scripts for the school plays and often being shown writing. In high school, she even begins writing a book that can best be described as an in-universe version of the manga. When she goes to college at the end of the manga she says she wants to get into a writing-related career.
• Nozaki of Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun is mainly a Sequential Artist, but he sometimes writes plays for Hori of the school drama club in exchange for Hori drawing backgrounds for him.
• Shirobako is a series about the process of making anime. Main character Aoi is a production assistant, whose role is to make sure everything stays on schedule, but we see writers, animators, sound effects creators, and the occasional voice actor.
• The Comic Artist and his Assistants is a comedy about pervy manga artist Aito Yuuki and his staff of Beleaguered Assistants.
• The protagonist of ERASED is a struggling manga artist, which doesn't have that much relevance to its main plot of traveling back in time to catch a serial killer.
• The protagonist of Dagashi Kashi wants to be a manga artist, but his art isn't that good.
• Kaasan: Mom's Life stars a mother who works as a mangaka.
• Nichijou's tritagonist Mio is an aspiring mangaka who draws yaoi doujin in her spare time. Fellow Four-Temperament Ensemble member Mai has also written at least one unpublished manga...though her style tends toward the same absurdist humor that runs the series.
• Episode 10 of Paranoia Agent shows an anime studio struggling to put a pilot together. The creators are overworked, irresponsible, and hostile towards each other; and the episode plays out like Satoshi Kon and Madhouse's twisted sadomasochistic fantasy of ending it all.
• While she doesn't have anything published, Ayano in Asteroid in Love is actually a budding fantasy novelist. She left the Literature Club for the Newspaper Club mainly because the former seems to be more interested in literary criticism than creative writing, while the Newspaper Club's president is willing to provide feedback on her writings. Her limelight chapter shows she takes so much time writing that her classmate notices she keeps Asleep in Class.
• Why the Hell Are You Here, Teacher!?: The eleventh arc, starting with Chapter 101, focuses on Minamoto, a teacher who's also a mangaka, and Kobayashi, a student who dreams of being one as well.
• The Kindaichi Case Files:
  • Itsuki is a freelance writer who used to write for a weekly paper a decade ago. That being said, he functions more as an Intrepid Reporter in many a mystery case arc.
  • In The (37-year-old) Kindaichi Case Files, Fumi, as an adult in her late 20's, works as a mystery novelist.
  • Some of the individual case arcs have a writer as among the participants in a given case. Which role said writer plays varies, depending on the case arc in question.
• The Official Couple of the seinen romance manga A Galaxy Next Door consists of Shōjo mangaka Ichiro Kuga and his assistant Shiori Goshiki, who learned to draw manga by tracing his.
• The Summer You Were There stars Shizuku Hoshikawa, who took to writing as an outlet for her emotions. She started with a web novel titled, "Girls Lovers Suicide," which she wrote to work through her guilt about bullying her elementary school classmate Ruri Ichinose and the isolation caused by her ostracism. After being viciously attacked online for inadvertently making it resemble an actual tragedy, she finishes the story, then plans on killing herself after throwing it out, only for her classmate Kaori Asaka to find it. At Kaori's urging, Shizuku begins writing again, first writing a story that later becomes the basis for an apology letter to Ruri, then takes Kaori's suggestion to write a love story about the two of them. Shizuku completes the story just before Kaori dies and sends her the final line, in which Shizuku's character tells Kaori character, "I love you" as a Love Confession.
• "Murai-kun Wants to Fuck Mizuno-kun": It's mentioned in passing that Mizuno works as an editor at a small book publisher.

Comic Books

• In the Superman mythos, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen — and in some continuities Kara Danvers — are reporters.
• Alan Moore writes Providence as a homage to the writer H. P. Lovecraft and his main protagonist Robert Black is himself an aspiring novelist and literary reader.
• In Kabuki, the titular heroine writes children's books after she retires from a life of violence.
• The original Grendel, Hunter Rose, is a world-renowned novelist.
• Supreme is a comic book artist.
• Also in DC Comics, Sam Simeon (of Angel and the Ape), R. Rodney Rabbit (aka Captain Carrot), and Kyle Rayner (one of Earth's many Green Lanterns) are comic book artists.
• Daniel Clowes (Eightball) frequently writes about artists and writers. Enid Coleslaw of Ghost World was an artist, as is Dan Pussey of Pussey! It's alluded to in David Boring that the title character is a multimedia artist. At least two of the main characters (including the main character) of Ice Haven are writers. Twentieth Century Eightball is a collection of short-stories from Clowes, many of which are about artists (Art School Confidential, Ink Studs, etc.).
• Transmetropolitan's main character, Spider Jerusalem.
• Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America) has worked as a comic book artist — even illustrating a Captain America comic!
• Tintin is nominally a reporter, although he has only rarely been seen to file any stories.
• Wild's End. The main group includes a writer and reporter. Then we are introduced to two eminent sci-fi writers. There are multiple sequences where these characters sit and write about their experiences.
• In Dream Country, the third book of The Sandman (1989), a struggling writer gets famous thanks to his imprisonment and rape of Calliope, the Greek muse. He buys her from another writer, whom it is implied became famous through the same means. Unsurprisingly, Calliope is not thrilled about this arrangement; neither is the title character, with whom Calliope once had a child and who delivers some karmic justice to her captor.
• The first main character introduced in Strikeforce: Morituri, Harold Everson, is an aspiring writer. He writes about his adventures with the Morituri and dreams of living on through his work like Hemmingway.
• The Astro City story "Where the Action Is" follows the tribulations of a comic book writer.

Comic Strips

• Jon Arbuckle of Garfield was specifically identified as a cartoonist in early strips, at least before he essentially became a full-time Cloudcuckoolander loser guy. In the cartoon, however, his profession regularly drives the conflict in the plot.
• The father in The Family Circus is also a cartoonist. The family seems to be based on Bil Keane's. His son in the strip, Jeffy, shares the name of his son in real life, who eventually took over doing the strip.
• Michael Patterson of For Better or for Worse. His first novel is a best-seller.
• Sydney in Dykes to Watch Out For is an academic writer and there have been other minor characters like Deidre and Anjlai who write but main character and semi-Author Avatar Mo has creator Alison Bechdel's bibliophile tendencies instead of being a writer herself.
• Pretty much everybody in modern Funky Winkerbean is a writer or comics artist, is going to become a writer or comics artist, is a writer or comic artist's girlfriend/wife, has their life revolve around writing or comics in some other capacity, or is about to be Put on a Bus. In this universe, writers are the only successful and fulfilled individuals, and are irresistible to the opposite sex. Especially if they write comics.
• Val in Retail is an aspiring one, and hopes to someday be able to afford to quit Grumbel's in order to devote her time to it. Cooper's new job at the end of the comic, which pays twice as much as Grumbel's did, finally allows her to do so.

Fan Works

• Naruto in A Growing Affection ghost wrote for Jiraiya during the time skip, and helped with the outline for the next few books as well.
• Vale, the protagonist of the Hunger Games fanfic Some Semblance of Meaning, wants to be a writer, even if she simultaneously acknowledges this aspiration as "unrealistic". Her writer's mind affects her perception of events at times, and her storytelling actually comes into play when Kit asks her on his deathbed to tuck him in, and she tells him about a "land without districts" where good people go when they die, and later, when she echoes that story during the final confrontation.
• One of the sidestories of Pokémon Reset Bloodlines features Gary meeting a former Pokémon trainer-turned-novelist named Casey Snagem, who has written many best-sellers. In another, it's revealed that Elite Four member Lorelei writes magazine articles and light novels under the Pen Name "Prima".
• Played with in the Dragon Age series Skyhold Academy Yearbook, in which students Rory and Jim are aspiring writers. Specifically, they write in-universe fanfic about their teachers. It’s actually a device for the (real) authors, allowing them to write Alternate Universe stories about the characters and include them in what is already an Alternate Universe fanfiction.
• In A Prize for Three Empires, Carol Danvers is a pretty successful novelist.
• Both Klar Kent and his wife Lyra from Superman of 2499: The Great Confrontation are reporters. On top of it, Lyra is a popular writer.
• The imagination of Wendy in Not Old, Alone or Done For hasn't changed much since childhood. She puts it to good use through writing.

Films — Animated

• The corollary to this is "Most animators are artists." In Tangled's musical number "When Does My Life Begin?", Rapunzel demonstrates a wide variety of talents, but the only one of them that becomes crucial to the plot is her art skill.
• In the Novelization of Turning Red, Mei and her friends are all fanfic writers.

Films — Live-Action

• An Angel at My Table is a biopic of New Zealand writer Janet Frame.
• The main character from 2012 was a science fiction writer, albeit an unsuccessful one.
• The protagonist in Throw Momma from the Train is an author and writing professor who tutors people that want to write books.
• The leading character in La notte is a famous author who attends the presentation of his own book.
• In Moulin Rouge!, Christian is a struggling writer.
• Holly Martins winds up as one after the end of the film.
• Barton Fink is about a writer suffering from writer's block, written while the Coens themselves were having difficulty with Miller's Crossing. This writer really wants to make arty, weighty, important movies about the plight of the common man (mainly Fink), similar to his successful play, but gets assigned a wrestling picture instead.
• In the film Croupier the protagonist is a novelist working as a croupier for a day job. The film really starts to get interesting when he commences writing a thinly disguised roman á clef entitled I, Croupier, the plot of which resembles his own life.
• Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation. is a particularly surreal take on this trope. Kaufman himself (as played by Nic Cage) is the protagonist, and the movie is at least in part about the writing of itself. Then it gets even more surreal. The writer credits for the movie include Donald Kaufman, Charlie Kaufman's fictional twin brother, who's also a character in the movie, and also a writer (and also played by Nic Cage).
• The Jet Li movie, Dr. Wai in "The Scripture with No Words", in which Li plays a Non-Action Guy for once, a writer picturing himself as a badass adventurer he created on paper. All the action scenes in the movie are Imagine Spot which Li puts himself in while thinking about how to progress with his latest story.
• Stranger Than Fiction also uses the device in an eerie, roundabout, and darkly humorous manner.
• Sunset Boulevard: Protagonist and narrator Joe Gillis is a screenwriter, and this proves important — he catches Norma Desmond's interest as she believes he can help her complete the script of her great comeback film. To complete the triangle, Joe's girlfriend Betty is another aspiring screenwriter.
• Shakespeare in Love, naturally.
• Marty's father becomes a bestselling science fiction author in Back to the Future.
• Gordie, the protagonist of Stand by Me, writes and tells stories as a teenager; the movie ends by showing us the now-adult Gordie writing the events of the film on his computer, while his son irritably waits to be taken to the pool.
• Brother Gilbert in Dragonheart wants to compose epic ballads, and spends part of the film trying to write one about protagonist Bowen.
• It would be shorter to list the Woody Allen movies where one of the main characters isn't a writer.
• Lady in the Water: There is a writer whose future work is destined to save the world. Did I mention that M. Night Shyamalan plays the character himself?
• Romancing the Stone is about a female author who gets pulled into a treasure hunt alongside a rugged male adventurer played by Michael Douglas. It was written by a female writer who got pulled into the world of Hollywood by Michael Douglas.
• In Withnail and I, the character only officially known as "I" is a writer, but all he writes is "just thoughts, really." His writing serves as the movie's occasionally Fauxlosophic Narration.
• In How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, which is based on a memoir by a British journalist, most of the characters are journalists (and a lot of them have hobbies such as writing poetry or novels).
• The Coward: Protagonist Amitabha Ray is a screenwriter who accidentally runs into his ex-girlfriend while road-tripping to get ideas for his next story. (Even better, he shares a last name with the writer/director of the movie, Satyajit Ray.)
• Ruby Sparks: Calvin is a young novelist struggling with writer's block.
• Seven Psychopaths: Marty is a struggling writer who dreams of finishing his screenplay Seven Psychopaths.
• Sleuth: One of the protagonists has become wealthy as a successful writer of popular, though now old-fashioned, crime fiction novels, which feature an aristocratic amateur detective, St. John Lord Merridew.
• Before Sunset: Jesse has written a novel, This Time, inspired by his time with Celine, and the book has become an American bestseller.
• The Help: Skeeter has just finished college and comes home with dreams of becoming a writer.
• In a Lonely Place: The film starts out with Dixon being a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who has not had a hit "since before the war."
• World's Greatest Dad: Lance Clayton is a struggling author.
• Factotum: Chinaski is working toward becoming a writer.
• Following: The protagonist is a struggling, unemployed young writer.
• In The Shining, the fact that the protagonist is a writer who is suffering severely from writer's block is the reason the family goes to the hotel in the first place.
• The Third Man: Holly Martens, the protagonist, is an American pulp Western writer - in this case, it's drawing attention to the fact that he's somewhat afflicted with arrested emotional development, considering Harry Lime to be basically a good guy because they were friends once. At least until he gets a look at what Lime was really like.
• Basic Instinct: Catherine Tramell, the female lead, is a crime novelist. And a particularly manipulative and genre-savvy one at that; by the end of the film it's revealed that she set up almost every event to emulate her own book.
• The Door In The Floor: The protagonist is a children's book author and artist.
• Swimming Pool (2003): The story revolves around a middle-aged English mystery author, who is having writer's block that is impeding her next book.
• Secret Window: The story is about a successful author suffering from writer's block and depression.
• Breakfast at Tiffany's: The male lead is a writer who has not had anything published in five years since writing a book of vignettes titled Nine Lives.
• The main character in Midnight in Paris is a writer trying to put the finishing touches on his novel.
• If You Believe: Susan, the protagonist, is an editor working for a publishing house and Tom is a lawyer who gave up his career to become a writer. Susan ends up editing his first novel.
• William Hurt's character in Smoke (1995) is a novelist whose career came to a halt after the tragic death of his wife. The character is named Paul Benjamin, a reference to the film's writer Paul Auster, whose second forename is Benjamin.
• Cabin by the Lake centers around a scriptwriter's problems to write a satisfying conclusion to his story... and is also a serial killer.
• In the Mouth of Madness: Sutter Cane is the most popular (horror) writer who ever lived and he's the villain no less. At its core, the film looks at what the awesome power of writing means to the characters who occupy the novels themselves.
• Baltimore Hall of Twixt is a writer, with the difficulties of writing a plot and avoiding being pigeonholed in one's genre being almost as center-stage as the vampire-related killings.
• Both Swimming with Sharks and The Player are centered around some producers in Hollywood, and of course, the trouble they get from writers.
• Set It Up: Harper, one of the protagonists, is an aspiring sports journalist. Her boss, Kirsten, is a prominent one.
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: Juliet is an up-and-coming writer fresh off the success of her second book, and tries to write an article throughout the film.
• Paperback Hero: Hugh Jackman plays Jack, a truck driver who secretly writes romance novels under the name of his female best friend Ruby Vale.
• The main viewpoint character of White Hunter, Black Heart is writer Pete Verill, an Author Avatar for Peter Veriel (and the whole story is based on his experiences working on The African Queen in Africa).
• Love Hard: Natalie is a columnist for a Shallow News Site Satire, a job that gives her leeway to fly across the country for an online crush because she can write about it.
• The female lead of Coda (2019), Helen, is a music critic, and the film is framed around her attempting to profile Henry.
• Super me (2019) is a movie about Sang Yu, a financially broken writer, and all the movie remarks how he is a "good writer".
• Alex Garland's Civil War (2024) is about a group of war journalists covering the Second American Civil War.

Literature

• The Lord of the Rings is itself the Framing Device variant of this. Which is why so many other fantasy writers/stories do it. Tolkien claimed to be the translator of a book originally written by Frodo (and also Frodo's original manuscript was lost, and Tolkien was actually translating a work copied by an anonymous human). Slightly averted in that Tolkien wasn't a professional writer (he was a professor of Philology, or as the Americans say it, Historical Linguistics). But since Tolkien is primarily known as a writer (despite having researched and edited a section of the Oxford English Dictionary and revolutionized his professional field), it seems fair to list this here. He probably invoked it because he realized he wasn't the world's best writer and because he was trying to make a mythology (which he pretty much succeeded in doing, more or less). Frodo can be seen writing the book at the beginning of the movie, and then hands it to Sam in the last scene before getting on the ship to Valinor. In-universe, Frodo is of course continuing a family tradition: with Bilbo Baggins having authored The Hobbit. Bilbo writing his book is actually the reason why Frodo goes on his adventures to begin with: because Bilbo decides to skip the second part of his birthday party in order to take his finished book to Rivendell (it was Lord Elrond who originally requested the book). When he does so, he leaves the Ring behind: Gandalf then seizes the moment to convince Frodo to undertake the journey to destroy the Ring.
  • Tolkien also invoked the trope outside of his books. He had a professor alter ego called Lowdham, and an academic in-universe alter ego Pengolodh, which names he used to write articles about his invented world without tooting his own horn.
• Morag Gunn, the protagonist of Margaret Laurence's novel The Diviners (1974), is a writer.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  • Ford Prefect's job as a writer for the eponymous Encyclopedia Exposita provides him with an excuse to go on his dangerously irresponsible adventures. His problems with his editors (who butchered a long, complex, beautifully written article he spent fifteen years on into two words) are a major point in the series.
  • And Arthur Dent worked for the BBC. Take a guess at who Douglas worked for. This gets lampshaded in the Quandary Phase of the radio series, where Arthur's producer is played by the original producer of Hitchhiker's, Geoffrey Perkins. A significantly Downplayed Trope in this case, however: in the first volume of the novel this fact is confined to a single brief mention that he "worked in local radio" that never really comes up again afterwards, and indeed Adams never quite gets around to going into specifics, so Arthur could just as easily have been a sound engineer or even a presenter.
• The Raffles stories are framed as memoirs by Raffles's friend Bunny Manders, who, outside of being a writer, works as a journalist in the stories proper.
• Richard Matheson:
  • "Mad House" focuses on a writer with a nasty case of writer's block, among other problems.
  • And the protagonist in What Dreams May Come was a writer for television. He was made a pediatrician in the movie.
• Pat Murphy:
  • In Adventures In Space And Time With Max Merriwell, the title character is an author who meets living avatars of his Pen Names on a cruise. The other characters all take a writing workshop with him. The character Pat Murphy (Pat Murphy often names characters after herself) writes a blog called The Bad Grrl's Guide to physics. Murphy is a science writer.
  • In Wild Girls, two twelve-year-old girls write a story together. When they win a writing contest, they get to take a writing workshop with the eccentric Vera Volante.
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle:
  • Allen Carpentier, the protagonist of Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle), is a Speculative Fiction writer, just like Niven and Pournelle. In some ways, Carpentier seems to represent Niven (more so than Pournelle), and expies of many other SF authors and other then-famous personages appear in the story, but at the same time, Carpentier's depiction is used to savage personal shortcomings that Niven himself might reasonably have.
  • Footfall features several sci-fi authors, including clear Author Avatar versions of both authors as well as one of Robert A. Heinlein, brought together by the government to help think up ways to fight an alien invasion.
  • Lucifer's Hammer (partly based on a scene from the first draft of Footfall that their editor demanded they expand into a novel in its own right) features writers and journalists among the characters living through the collapse of civilization after a major comet impact.
• Jo March (later Bhaer) of Little Women is pretty much a perfect example of an Author Avatar (although in general, done quite well).
• Robert A. Heinlein loves this trope. Among his protagonists who are writers who bear more than a passing resemblance to the author or friends of his:
  • Jubal Harshaw of Stranger in a Strange Land, who writes in a variety of genres and media, under a bunch of pseudonyms.
  • Hazel Stone of The Rolling Stones (1952), who writes a pulpy sci-fi adventure TV series.
  • The nameless protagonist of —All You Zombies—, who spends some time writing stories for a "True Confessions" magazine, and gets the nickname "The Unmarried Mother" partly from this fact.
  • The protagonist of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is a fiction writer who lives on an orbital space colony.
  • The final chapter of The Number of the Beast is a huge cross-dimensional convention attended by sci-fi authors and characters from multiple fictional universes.
• Quite a few of Stephen King's protagonists are also writers.
  • Novelists:
    • Misery: Paul Sheldon is the author of a best-selling series of Victorian-era romance novels surrounding the heroine character Misery Chastain. The antagonist, a fan of his books, doesn't like the way he tried to conclude the series and goes off the deep end.
    • 'Salem's Lot: Ben Mears
    • The Dark Tower: He's written himself into the story (though not as the protagonist).
    • "Word Processor of the Gods", a short story in the collection Skeleton Crew.
    • "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet", also in Skeleton Crew: Reg Thorpe
    • The Tommyknockers: Roberta "Bobbi" Anderson, a writer of Westerns although it's a bit of a misdirection, as she actually becomes the first victim, and her friend Gard, a poet, steps in as the true protagonist.
    • The Dark Half: Thad Beaumont
    • It: Bill Denbrough, a horror writer.
    • "The Langoliers", a novella published in the collection Four Past Midnight: Bob Jenkins is a mystery writer who does some Genre Savvy analysis of the situation.
    • "Secret Window, Secret Garden", also in Four Past Midnight: Mort Rainey
    • Desperation, and The Regulators: Johnny Marinville
    • Bag of Bones: Mike Noonan is a novelist suffering from writer's block.
    • Lisey’s Story: Scott Landon (Lisey's deceased husband)
    • "The Body" (AKA Stand by Me) Gordon Lachance
    • "Umney's Last Case", a short story in Nightmares & Dreamscapes
    • "The Road Virus Heads North", a short story in Everything's Eventual: Richard Kinell, a horror writer.
    • "Big Driver", a short story in Full Dark, No Stars: Tess, a mystery writer.
  • Non-novelist writers:
    • Selena St. George in Dolores Claiborne is a journalist.
    • The Colorado Kid: Three of the four main characters are reporters or otherwise work for a newspaper.
    • CELL: Clayton Riddell is a writer of graphic novels.
    • The Tommyknockers: Jim Gardener is a poet.
    • "1408", a short story in Everything's Eventual: Mike Enslin writes non-fiction books about haunted places.
    • The Shining: Jack Torrance is working on a play and has a pile of short stories under his belt.
    • Carrie: Sue Snell wrote a book about her experiences.
    • The Stand: Harold Lauder is an amateur writer. He writes fantasy stories in the second person plural, and later a personal diary.
    • The Green Mile: Paul Edgecombe is the narrator, a main character, and also writes a huge portion of the book.
    • In Doctor Sleep, Chetta is a poet and her granddaughter's husband is a history professor taking a sabbatical to write a book.
  • The protagonist in Joyland is a magazine writer/editor.
• Stephen King's son, Joe Hill, has got in on the act to some degree, too. Though his first two novels bucked the trend by having main characters who were musicians, his third novel NOS4A2 follows the protagonist from childhood and has her grow up to become a successful author and illustrator of children's books. A number of his short story protagonists are writers too, such as the main character of "Best New Horror".
• The first book in the Legacy of the Aldenata series by John Ringo starts off with a clear Author Avatar sci-fi writer being called in as an expert by the government to help deal with the consequences of First Contact with aliens. A clear equivalent of David Weber is mentioned as being in the same group.
• The primary protagonist of the Troy Rising series by John Ringo, Tyler Vernon, was originally the author of a webcomic called TradeHard. By the end of the first book, he is by several orders of magnitude the richest man in the world, who (as is mentioned several times) "talks to the US President when Vernon makes the time in Vernon's schedule".
• The male protagonist in Breakfast at Tiffany's was a writer.
• John Irving loves this trope.
  • The World According to Garp. Garp's first two novels have plots that are similar to Irving's first two novels. In fact, a rejection letter Garp receives for one of his stories was one that Irving received in Real Life for the same story.
  • The narrator of Irving's The 158 Pound Marriage is a semi-successful author of historical fiction. The novel describes but also results from an author's frustrating, year-long research trip to Vienna, which yielded no intriguing fictional narratives but did yield a hot wife.
  • A Widow for One Year. Ruth Cole, the protagonist, is a successful writer. Her father, who is a main character in both sections of the book, is a writer/illustrator of Not for Children children's books. Her long-lost mother writes detective fiction.
  • The youngest sister in The Hotel New Hampshire writes a book.
  • Daniel Baciagalupo in Last Night in Twisted River is a novelist. A novelist whose books include one on Vietnam, and another on abortion.
• Kurt Vonnegut:
  • His novels have the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, though he's not exactly how the author consciously inserts himself into his stories. (Actually, if Trout is based on anybody, he is based on Theodore Sturgeon, of Sturgeon's Law.)
  • The main character in his novel Cat's Cradle is a writer who starts out doing research for a book he's planning to write about the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Later in the story, he takes an assignment from a magazine to visit the island of San Lorenzo and write an article on it, where he gets more than he bargained for.
• Erica Jong:
  • Fear of Flying and its sequels, How to Save Your Own Life and Parachutes and Kisses: Isadora Wing is loosely based on Jong and the stories on her personal life.
  • Sappho's Leap is about the poet Sappho.
• Jake Woods and Clarence Abernathy, respective protagonists of the first two books in a trilogy by Randy Alcorn, are both newspaper columnists.
• The dual narrators of the Ambergris book Shriek: An Afterword are an ex-gallerist and an ex-historian respectively, and both earned their living for much of their lives as freelance writers of various essays and articles. Since the book is a fictional autobiography, the financial problems associated with the profession are often in the foreground.
• Greg Bear's science fiction novel Queen of Angels revolves around a novelist, playwright, and poet, who has just killed eight people. Another main character is also a writer.
• Dean Koontz seems to be quite fond of this trope; to name just a few examples, the protagonist of his book Cold Fire is a reporter, and in Lightning, the main character is a novelist.
• Henry Fitzroy, the vampire from Tanya Huff's Blood Books series (turned into the TV show Blood Ties (2007)), is a romance novelist. In the TV version, he writes and draws graphic novels.
• Lily from The Secret Life of Bees discovers and professes her talent for writing, mostly fiction.
• L. M. Montgomery often used this trope:
  • Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables publishes various short stories that are published. Several times in the series people accuse her of writing friends and family into her stories. The Anne books are in many ways autobiographical with Anne's life reflecting many events in L. M. Montgomery's life including the deaths of her children.
  • In The Blue Castle has a mysterious writer who ends up with a close connection to the main characters.
  • A Tangled Web (1931) there is an unseen book-writing lady that is mentioned. Some characters live in the hope that she will "write them into a story". Others live in terror of her doing exactly the same thing.
  • Emily, of the Emily of New Moon books, knows she not only wants to be a writer, she is a writer with all of herself. The people around her can use this need to manipulate her if they want — promising her that she can go to college, no strings attached, but only if she gives up writing fiction for the entire time. And in the third book, Dean Priest tells her that A Seller of Dreams is, basically, "cute," because he's jealous of her writing and wants her to give it up, even though he realizes it is an unfinished masterpiece.
• William Goldman's The Color Of Light is about this trope. It goes a bit over the top in lampshading it, though.
• Scheherazade gives the impression of being some Arab Coffeehouse bard's ideal woman.
• Dr. Watson is, of course, a medical professional, but it's on account of his writings about Holmes that Holmes is so well known. Of course, the stories he writes that make Holmes famous are the same ones that we read, so this could be the world's first meta example of the trope.
  • Being one of the few doubled tropes on this page, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was also a doctor. Naturally a doctor-writer would write about a doctor-writer.
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula goes even further. It's presented as a series of journal entries and articles compiled by Mina Harker, and the construction of the book itself assists the heroes in uncovering Dracula's secrets. So the writing of the book is actually a plot point within the book.
• Judy Abbott, the heroine of Daddy-Long-Legs, goes to college specifically because of her writing. Her anonymous benefactor likes a funny essay she wrote about the orphanage where she grew up, and agrees to sponsor her education so she can become a writer. Over the course of the story, she becomes a published author of short stories and then novels.
• The narrator in Nikos Kazantzakis's stunning novel Zorba the Greek is a writer, an attribute for which Zorba often pokes fun at him.
• The narrator of the framing story in Life of Pi is an author who wrote a historical fiction novel that should technically have been amazing, but to him was so unlikely to raise any eyebrows in book publishing that he tossed the entire manuscript. Then at a café he met someone who told him about a young Indian man named Piscine...
• In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert is a literature professor, and although he never refers to novels that he has actually published, he does tell Charlotte Haze that he was working on a novel when she finds some very suspect entries in his journal.
  • He is writing a rather large scholarly piece on the works of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire, which I believe is actually published early on in the novel. This is a common trope for Nabokov, at least for his English language novels; almost every one of them features some sort of writer as the protagonist. As we approach the end of his career, the number of similarities between this writer/protagonist is notably increased. Nabokov notes this, and frequently takes a poke at his protagonists for being shades of a more 'real' life.
  • According to legend, the implications that this trope presents almost led Nabokov to destroy his materials for Lolita, on the fear that people would think he was actually Humbert.
  • One of Nabokov's books actually begins with a scene the protagonist is watching out his window that he decides he wants to use to start his novel someday.
• In Tempe O'Kun's Windfall Max is an aspiring writer, while Kylie's mother Laura was the lead writer on the Show Within a Show that they acted in.
• The lead of P. G. Wodehouse's Life Among the Chickens is a writer named James Garnet. Early in the story, he shares a train carriage with a pretty young woman who (unbeknownst to her) is reading his novel, and says to her father that she likes the protagonist. The following quote forces the reader to frown at the novel and go "hang a minute!"
  "But I like Arthur," said Phyllis, and she smiled—the first time Garnet had seen her do so.
  
  Garnet also smiled to himself. Arthur was the hero. He was a young writer. Ergo, Arthur was himself.
  • Also, both members of the Alpha Couple in Wodehouse's Something Fresh are writers for the same pulp magazine publisher. In fact, Ashe Marson's character Gridley Quayle becomes a minor plot point because Freddie, son of the Earl of Emsworth, is a huge fan of his, which makes Freddie all too willing to give Ashe the prized scarab he stole from his father, who in turn stole it from Ashe's employer by accident.
• One of Hercule Poirot's friends in Third Girl is a middle-aged mystery-writing Englishwoman, much like Agatha Christie, who tries a spot of amateur detecting. And, in accordance with the tropes of the genre, is clonked over the head shortly thereafter.
  • Agatha Christie has several characters who are writers, including Ariadne Oliver and Miss Marple's nephew Raymond West, both of whom appear repeatedly in supporting roles throughout her stories.
• The narrator-protagonist of The War of the Worlds is an academic author. H.G. Wells wrote a lot of non-fiction alongside his novels and short stories, though he is less known for the former today.
• The protagonist in Terry Pratchett's non-Discworld short story "Final Reward" is the author of a long-selling series of barbarian fantasy novels.
  • From the Discworld novels, William De Worde started off as a freelance letter writer, then later becomes a newspaper publisher and journalist in The Truth. Appropriate when one realizes that Pratchett was originally a journalist himself.
  • In Maskerade, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg travel to Ankh-Morpork after they learn Nanny's been cheated out of royalties from her risque cookbook. The throwaway gag about spelling "famine" with seven letters is a Shout-Out to the same error that occurred in Real Life.
  • In Snuff, Vimes has to meet with a famous children's book writer Miss Beedle. Walking up to her house, he muses that he has no idea what writers do at home. Possibly sit in their nightgown drinking champagne. A footnote remarks that this is completely true.
• The protagonist of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a successful writer whose life quickly turns to shit. When things start getting better, he refuses to believe it is real...
• The Tomorrow Series: Both Ellie and Chris are writers.
• French author Bernard Werber loves to put writers as characters: journalists and novelists are all over the place, it seems.
• British author and cartoonist Ros Asquith has done this several times. Letty in the Teenage Worrier series (although her dream is to become a film director, she frequently mentions that she is a published author as well), Cordelia in the Girl Writer series, and Flowkwee in Letters From an Alien Schoolboy are all examples.
• An egregious example is Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, whose story is largely told from the perspective of Patty Berglund writing her autobiography. Even though Patty knows she isn't too smart and otherwise shies away from intellectual life, she seems to write about as well as Jonathan Franzen does in the rest of the novel.
• Although her calling in life is to be a Guardian, Mercedes Lackey creation Diana Tregarde's income comes from writing romance novels.
  • Her Author Avatar in the Heralds of Valdemar series is a historian and chronicler, as well. She only gets a speaking role in the Exile series, however.
• House of Leaves is a more indirect use of this trope. To quote the quote on its page, "It's a book about a book about a film about a house that is a labyrinth."
• Betsy in the Betsy-Tacy series is all about telling stories in the early books, then naturally progresses to a writer as she grows older. She shares her passion for writing with her future husband. This makes sense, as Betsy was basically an Expy of the writer Maud Hart Lovelace, who was also married to another passionate writer.
• The narrator-protagonist of Carol Shields's Unless is a writer and translator.
• The Red Tree follows Sara Crowe, a writer suffering from an intense block after the suicide of her girlfriend.
• In The Book of Joe, the protagonist is Joe Goffman, a successful author struggling with his writer's block.
• In Fame, there's only a single character in the entire novel who doesn't see himself as a writer or character. The rest of the cast consists of three writers, a forum addict, a number of fictional characters, a world-famous actor, a man who invents his own new life, and a woman who ends up as a fictional character against her will.
• Lord Peter Wimsey's love interest Harriet Vane is a mystery writer. And that's not the only similarity between her and Dorothy Sayers.
• Wonder Boys — both novel and film — is about an English professor who is stuck in the middle of writing an endless, soul-sucking Door Stopper of a novel.
• Charlie Bucktin, the main (but not titular) character of Craig Silvey's Jasper Jones, is an aspiring author. And so is his dad.
• Tosca Lee's Demon: A Memoir is premised around not one, but two main characters as writers: one, an editor who has tried and failed for years to write novels, and second, a demon with a marvelous storytelling gift but no ability to physically write and publish his story. Hence, a partnership (of sorts?) is born.…
• Kill time or die trying, being based on real events, most of which the authors were present for, features the authors themselves as characters. Subverted, in that the fact their being writers is barely mentioned, apparently to avoid spoiling the fun of trying to figure out which characters are the authors.
• Jack McEvoy in the Michael Connelly novels The Poet and The Scarecrow is a journalist just as Michael Connelly was before becoming a mystery writer. Said reporter ends up uncovering serial killers in both stories.
• A very literal example of this trope, Stephen Glass, former journalist for The New Republic and who is most well-known for partially or wholly fabricating many of his stories, went on to write a semi-fictional novel about a journalist who is caught fabricating his stories.
• Ben Mason was a poet before he was turned into a zombie.
• Meg in This Tragic Universe, by Scarlett Thomas, is a Starving Artist paying the bills (just) with ghostwritten genre fiction while trying to write a "proper" novel that has gone through multiple rewrites over several years. (And yes, she's contemplating adultery).
• In many a Chivalric Romance, the narrator praises generosity to minstrels, and the porter — who, being in charge of the door, could keep minstrels out — is often the Butt-Monkey of the tale.
• Tom Holt has two in My Hero!; the protagonist is a writer of Heroic Fantasy adventure stories, and the second is a mysteriously-vanished western writer who has gotten Trapped in TV Land and needs the help of the first to escape from the story.
• The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica takes this trope and runs wild with it. The main characters, as revealed at the end of the first book, are Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien—additionally, H. G. Wells, James Barrie, and other notable authors are prominent side characters. They are initiated as Caretakers of a fantastic dimension called the Archipelago and the Imaginarium Geographica, which is an atlas of everything that ever existed in myth and fable, which ultimately results in each of them deciding I Should Write a Book About This (which become the classics we know today).
• In the new All Souls Trilogy, the main character Diana Bishop is a historian (with a specialty in Alchemic Texts) who just so happens to be a witch, an extremely powerful one, who pretty much holds the fate of the three creature races — witch, deamon and vampire — and maybe the world in her hands. The author, Deborah Harkness, is also a historian — this is her first fiction work. Taking that into account, we can see Harkness having the same reaction to Matthew Clairmont, a vampire; he's about fifteen hundred years old? THINK OF THE HISTORY HE'S LIVED THROUGH!!
• The Mervyn Stone series by Nev Fountain. Whodunnits about the former script editor of a cancelled sci-fi series by a playwright and Doctor Who audio-drama writer.
• The Last Dragon Chronicles: David's a geology student, but becomes a writer through Gadzooks' help. d'Lacey confesses that David is a kind of Author Avatar. Then it turns out that David is an in-universe fictional character who was written into existence by his landlady's ex-boyfriend.
• In The Master and Margarita, the Master is a writer of a particularly un-Soviet persuasion, just like the author himself. And many antagonists/victims of demonic pranks are politically motivated literary critics, the same sort of people who made Bulgakov's life miserable.
• In The Trail of Cthulhu, four of the six protagonists have professions relatives to writer. Shrewsbury, Clairborne Boyd, and Horvath Blayne are scientists focused on humanities (the former about occultism, the two latter about ethnology), Nayland Colum is a novelist. Indirectly, Andrew Phelan has been hired by Shrewsbury because he has some skills in a secretary job, among other things. The less relevant protagonist to this trope is Abel Keane, who is a theology student aiming to become a priest.
• In Helen Cresswell's The Bagthorpe Saga, Mr Bagthorpe is a scriptwriter for The BBC.
• The narrator's father in Jean Robinson's The Strange But Wonderful Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon writes a cooking column under the name Grace Gallagher.
• Yuri Zhivago of Doctor Zhivago is an aspiring poet and novelist, something he seems to have been inspired to do by his uncle, Kolya Vedenyapin. Indeed, the third main plotline concerning his life, alongside his love life and his struggles in the midst of the Russian Revolution, is his striving to become a renowned writer.
• Mary Higgins Clark's novels often feature female protagonists who are writers. A few examples: Sharon Martin (A Stranger Is Watching) is a newspaper columnist, Menley Nichols (Remember Me) writes children's books, and Jean Sheridan (Nighttime Is My Time) is a historical writer.
• Writer Stephen Gordon, the protagonist of The Well of Loneliness, doubles as an Author Avatar.
• Rhona, the protagonist of A Harvest of War has written a shelf's worth of books.
• Nicodemus, the narrator and protagonist of The Letters From Nicodemus, works as a writer of haggadas (parables or moral lessons).
• The alien Paul in Alien in a Small Town earns his living writing his observations about human culture from an outsider's point of view.
• The lead character of The Walker Papers is Joanne Walker, a mechanic turned shaman turned beat cop turned detective. She has an incongruous degree in English literature and nerds over language in-character.
• Cody Lennox in "At First Just Ghostly" is an American writer visiting a London s-f/fantasy convention. He's burnt-out, drinks too much, and cannot come to grips with the loss of his wife.
• The Protagonist and narrator of Debra Adelaide's novel The Household Guide to Dying is an author of popular how-to books, the "household guides" to things including gardening and laundry. And when she finds out she is dying of metastatic cancer, she sets out to write her last book, the titular Household Guide to Dying.
• The Protagonist of Andrew Nicoll's novel The Love and Death of Caterina is one Luciano Hernando Valdez, a highly popular and respected writer from an unnamed Latin American country. The problem is that he is suffering from writer's block and all he has from his new novel is "a thin yellow cat crossed the road". And then he meets Caterina, a young student who admires him and also writes.
• Philip Roth wrote a series of novels about Nathan Zuckerman, who, like Roth, is a famous Jewish-American novelist, who was born in 1933, grew up in Newark, and had his greatest success with a controversial, sexually explicit book.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • "The Dead Past": Nimmo is a science writer, and extols the virtues of such In-Universe. He takes the information from scientists, synthesizes it into a narrative, and creates explanations that non-specialized readers can follow. It affords him a broad basis of scientific understanding, rather than a narrow view. Isaac Asimov has shared that this is how he views himself, a Science writer more than a Science Fiction writer.
  • "Galley Slave": Published in 1958, this story revolves around the work of a galley slave for a university. By this time, Dr Asimov had collaborated several times on creating university textbooks for publisher Walker And Wilkins, as well as being the sole author for several other nonfiction books on the subjects of physics and chemistry. The story goes into quite a bit of detail as the antagonist bringing a lawsuit against US Robotics is at risk of losing his reputation on the basis of the proofs created by EZ-27. Professor Ninheimer's rant at the end goes into detail about the joy of writing.
  • "Hell-Fire (1956)": The story is told from the third-person limited/omniscient perspective, but the focus for most of it is Alvin Horner, a reporter from the Continental Press.
  • "Kid Stuff": Jan Prentiss is a writer, like Dr Asimov, writing for a Bland-Name Product version of the same Pulp Magazine that printed this story.
  • "Nightfall (1941)": Theremon 762 is a newspaper reporter who has come to the astronomy tower to report on the eclipse, and he's used as an audience proxy, providing someone the astronomers can explain things to.
• An example with a dark twist: Winston Smith, the unassuming protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, works as a writer for the Ministry of Truth, his specific job being to redact inconvenient news stories or incorrect predictions made by the ruling Party, and replace it with propaganda he is told to make up from whole cloth. He says that his writing is the high point of his life. His love interest, Julia, is also a writer, albeit of amateur pornographic novels and other tripe meant to keep the populace distracted and happy. Author George Orwell was a highly experienced writer, and was wearily self-aware about the nature of the literary world, and it shows best here. Orwell also worked for the BBC during WW2, and observed Britain's wartime propaganda broadcasting at first hand. In some respects, the Ministry of Truth is, pretty much exactly, the wartime BBC.
• In the science fiction novel The Night Mayor, the protagonists, Susan Bishopric and Tom Tunney, are authors of computer-based interactive narratives, the closest thing to being a writer in a world where recreational reading has pretty much died out. Several scenes have Susan reflecting on aspects of the writer's life, such as dealing with the same old questions from fans and interviewers, and the annoyance of a key plot point being nullified by the march of science shortly after publication.
• Sir Mark Turner from Courtney Milan's Unclaimed is the Victorian moralist author of a popular treatise on chastity... whose interactions with his adoring fans sometimes have the comic ring of experience. "I'm not a saint. I'm not a holy man. I just wrote a book." "Your humility, sir—your good nature. Truly, you are an example to us all," Tolliver insisted.
• The Nikki Heat books (a Defictionalization of the Show Within a Show books from Castle) feature deuteragonist and Author Avatar Jameson Rook, who's a journalist rather than a novelist, but otherwise is a clear Self-Insert of Richard Castle.
• De Griezelbus: The Big Bad Paul Onnoval is a horror author and something of A Darker Me of Paul van Loon himself, while several of Onnoval's In-Universe stories feature similar authors. One story goes for a bit of Self-Deprecation with an author who hires a secretary to handle all his fan mail, who turns out to be a demon that gives his fans a spell that turns them into monsters. In another one, a sinister author invites one of his fans to a fictional town where the creatures in his stories are allowed to live but cannot leave, before revealing that the fan is also fictional.
• Adrian Mole fancies himself as a writer, as well as a diarist. In his Stylistic Suck novel Lo! The Flat Hills of my Homeland, his protagonist Jake writes a novel Sparg from Krong, in which Sparg writes a novel A Book with no Language.
• Margery Lawrence's Miles Pennoyer mysteries are largely framed as accounts of cases solved by Pennoyer that are later relayed to his friend and personal chronicler Jerome Latimer. The character of Latimer introduces himself in the "foreword" of the first collection as a former solicitor and current writer of moderate success.
• Taken to a new level by Ellery Queen, a mystery novelist whose main protagonist is a mystery novelist named Ellery Queen. Despite the direct connection, Ellery (the character) isn't an Author Avatar; Ellery the character is a well-spoken gentile writing while living off a large inheritence^*The Ellery character began life as an Expy of S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance, while Queen the pen name was a collaboration between two working class New York Jews; the connection was purely a marketing gimmick.
  • Because Ellery Queen is popular in Japan, many popular Japanese writers have done the same pen name-protagonist connection, inluding Reito Nikaidou, Rintarou Norizuki, and Alice Arisugawa, who goes a step further by writing *two* series featuring writers named Alice Arisugawa, who are also the authors of each others' Mutually Fictional series, thus making them examples In-Universe as well.
• The Impossible Us: We meet Nick as his career evolves from freelance editor to novelist (invokedone published novel in his past notwithstanding), including a brief scene meeting his agent.
• Carl Hiaasen has used this trope in a few of his novels.
  • In his first solo novel, Tourist Season, Brian Keyes, the main character, is a former reporter turned Private Detective, while the Big Bad is an opinion writer for the same newspaper the main character used to work at.
  • His fourth novel, Native Tongue, is about Joe Winder, a former newspaper reporter who is now writing PR for a theme park that serves as a Take That! towards Walt Disney World.
  • In his sixth novel, Stormy Weather, two of the main characters, newlyweds (though not for long) Max and Bonnie Lamb work for a PR firm, and in her Back Story, we learn Bonnie was a journalism major who went into PR when she couldn't find much work in journalism.
  • In his seventh novel Lucky You, Tom Krome, one of the main characters is a former investigative reporter now working for a small town newspaper who covers what seems like a fluff story - a part-time veterinarian's assistant wins the lottery - that turns into something more.
  • His ninth novel, Basket Case, is about Jack Tagger, a former investigative reporter who has been banished to the obituary desk after insulting the new owner of the paper.
• In November 9, dual protagonist Ben is a writer who aspires to get published someday. During their first meeting, Fallon challenges him to write a romance novel given he previously stated he had little interest in or experience with the genre, and he decides to write a story based upon his own relationship with Fallon. Also scattered throughout the novel are examples of Ben's poetry, where he discusses his inner thoughts and feelings.

Live-Action TV

• The Dick Van Dyke Show: Rob Petrie is a television comedy writer.
• Murder, She Wrote: Jessica Fletcher is a mystery writer.
• While not the main character, McGee of NCIS is a popular novelist on the side, writing thinly veiled accounts of his adventures with the Gibbs Team.
• Temperance Brennan of Bones is a forensic anthropologist who also uses her professional expertise to write books based on a "fictional" forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs — who is the real-life author of the books upon which the show is based.
• The protagonist of Castle (2009) writes mystery novels for a living, and because of his connections, he gets to spend a lot of time with the police, getting inspiration while offering his own professional insight. And if that wasn't enough, he writes about a writer who follows the NYPD around.
• The two main characters of Spaced are Tim, an artist who wants to write his own comic book, and Daisy, a print author with no ideas.
• Tv series Get Shorty much like in the original Elmore Leonard novel and film of the same name, Much of the story is about getting funding for, and otherwise making a movie.
• In Just Shoot Me!, everyone works for a magazine. The only one in the main cast who is a writer by profession is Maya, although Dennis has shown some writing prowess, penning (among other things) at least two screenplays, a few songs, an advice column, and most of his boss's "autobiography".
• Rory of Gilmore Girls is a journalist.
• Sex and the City: Carrie is a newspaper columnist.
• In both Kolchak: The Night Stalker and its short-lived retool Night Stalker, Kolchak was a reporter.
• Canadian channel TVO used to run a program called Write On, which offered grammar lessons as short TV sketches. Yes, it's about as strange as it sounds, but the characters were journalists. You can view an episode here
• 30 Rock: Liz (TV writer) is an Author Avatar by Tina Fey's own admission.
• Dennis Potter was a writer who suffered from severe psoriatic arthritis. His best-known work was the TV series (later made into a movie) The Singing Detective, about a writer who suffers from psoriatic arthritis. A difference is that the writer in the TV series wrote pulp detective fiction, while Potter mostly wrote rather surreal TV series.
• The cast in How I Met Your Mother aren't writers by trade, but they do enjoy spending hours brainstorming sit-com joke lines. On top of that, Barney is a popular blogger, Marshall writes songs as a hobby, and Ted and Barney compose dueling poems in The Sexless Innkeeper.
  • Ted may be an architect, but he does love to wax douchey about literature and poetry.
• During his retirement from the FBI, David Rossi of Criminal Minds supported himself as an author and lecturer. Although he is a nonfiction writer similar to the real-life profiler John Douglas.
• Ryan Hardy of The Following became a non-fiction author after being forced to retire from the FBI due to his injury.
• The father in 8 Simple Rules was a sports columnist.
• Raymond, of Everybody Loves Raymond, is also a newspaper columnist.
• The main protagonist of the show Bored to Death is a struggling writer who even has the same name as the creator of the show (Jonathan Ames).
• Jerry on Seinfeld is, like his Real Life counterpart, a comedian; many episodes show Jerry struggling to write new material for his act. When, in the episode "The Pitch", he and George pitch a "show about nothing" to NBC execs, this is a direct parody of the creation of the show by the real Jerry and Larry David.
• Californication: Hank Moody has written several novels and at least one screenplay (though he loathed the film adaptation), and is suffering from writer's block at the start of the series.
• Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess may not have been a writer in the same way the others are, but as a bard and chronicler of Xena's adventures, it's probably as close as we get. There's even an episode about her writing a story about Xena. Virgil, Joxer's son, is a poet, much like his real-life namesake.
• The first season of Mad Men revealed that most of the men in Sterling-Cooper have secret novels or plays they are working on. When one of them manages to get his short story published, he earns the immediate envy and respect of everyone else in the office.
• The L.A. Complex was all about struggling young actors.
• Kip and Henry from Bosom Buddies worked in advertising. Henry was a copywriter (and Kip an artist). Henry believed their experiences living in drag would "make a great book."
• In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the captain's son Jake starts working as a journalist and writing short stories and novels in his spare time by about the middle of the series.
  • The episode "Shadowplay" has Ben Sisko's son Jake trying to work up the courage to tell his father he wants to be a writer instead of joining Starfleet. Ben accepts this once Jake finally tells him
  • And in "The Muse" has a literal muse feeding off Jake writing. Creator Ron Moore even commented "...the notion of this exotic, beautiful, older woman who comes to you and gets excited by watching you write is like the most ridiculous idea! Only a writer would come up with that." Memory-alpha
  • Also, in "Far Beyond the Stars", Sisko experiences some type of vision or hallucination of an alternate reality in which he is a writer for a science fiction magazine in the 1950s. Many of the other major characters are also writers or otherwise affiliated with the magazine. Rather ironically, one of the main characters whose alter ego is not a writer is...Jake Sisko, the writer. (Likely this is because it was important to the story that "Benny Russell" be the only Black member on staff.)
• In Mama ist Unmöglich, Mama is a popular mystery writer. She has friends in the police and sometimes runs into fans as well.
• In The Affair, Noah has just published his first book when the story begins and is thinking about the second. His father-in-law Bruce Butler is a famous writer who remarks with contempt that everybody has a book in them, but almost no one has two.
• Parodied and Played for Drama in The X-Files episode "Milagro," where Mulder's next-door neighbor is a writer who's a self-indulgent, pretentious fantasist. But it turns sinister when he reveals he's writing a book in which Scully is his love interest and he moved next door to Mulder in order to see more of her.
• Masters of Horror: The episode "Valerie on the Stairs", which is based on a Clive Barker short story, concerns a writer moving into a boarding house for struggling writers and coming face to face with characters who escaped from a Round Robin story written by the other residents. Finally, he realizes that he was also invented by the residents and ceases to exist when the story finishes, making it a case of a writer writing about writers writing about a writer.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch's favourite subject is English, and she writes for the school paper, later majoring in journalism in college. One episode uniquely draws a distinction between journalism and fiction writing, as Sabrina struggles to give her stories good Character Development.
• Jane the Virgin: Jane is an aspiring romance novel writer.
• Gossip Girl's Dan Humphrey is an aspiring writer.
• Party of Five makes one of Julia's main characteristics her love of writing. Given the sheer amount of drama in her day-to-day life, she's bound to have a lot to write about. She ends the series with a book deal.
• Once Upon a Time introduces August, who carries around a manual typewriter with him and claims to be in Storybrooke doing research. This is just a cover and he's actually a grown-up Pinocchio here to make Emma believe in herself again.
• Million Yen Women: The protagonist Shin is a fiction writer.
• Get Shorty: The story revolves around gangsters creating a film, with an emphasis on developing the screenplay. One of the gangsters gets credited as the screenwriter and is tasked with making changes to the script, even though he's really not a writer.
• The Secret Life of Us: The original main character, Evan Wilde, is a novelist who manages to get published early in the second season.
• Madam Secretary: Liz's sole official act as acting president in the season 2 premiere is to pardon a journalist imprisoned for defying a court order to give up her source (prompted by her son doing a school project on the journalist).
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Elrond is a scholar and was introduced writing a speech for Gil-galad.

Music

• Referenced in the song "Paperback Writer" by The Beatles, in which a man who wants to be a paperback writer has written a book about a man who wants to be a paperback writer.

Theatre

• Trixie True Teen Detective has Joe Sneed, a writer who wants to write hard-boiled detective novels, but is stuck working in a syndicate stable writing perky-girl-detective stories instead.
• The Musical of Little Women uses this, of course, following the book, but it's amusingly evident when Jo, in the song "Weekly Volcano Press," supposedly reading aloud her story, reads something that sounds more like a script for a musical ("The forest is dark and spooky. Clarissa enters, her clothes in disarray...") than a past-tense short story normally would.
• Mark from RENT is a would-be filmmaker who has written a few screenplays (which he burns). His friend Roger spends the musical singing about how he wants to write a song.
• The protagonist of City of Angels is a writer trying to adapt his novel into a Film Noir. The antagonist is a meddling executive.
• Occurs twice in the canon of Stephen Sondheim: the Broadway songwriting team of Franklin Shepard and Charley Kringas in Merrily We Roll Along, whilst both Georges in Sunday in the Park with George are artists who struggle to be understood and accepted by their peers, much like Sondheim himself.
• Cliff Bradshaw in Cabaret — naturally enough, because the show ultimately derives from novelist Christopher Isherwood's memoirs kept while he was living in Weimar Berlin.
• In Fly by Night almost all the characters have some connection to musical theatre and/or songs. Harold is a songwriter and a guitarist, his father is an opera enthusiast, Daphne is a singer/actress, and Joey Storms is a Broadway playwright.
• The Seagull starts with Konstantin trying to impress his mother with a play he wrote and directed. His failure drives the rest of the play.
• My Sister Eileen and its musical adaptation Wonderful Town have the aspiring young writer Ruth Sherwood, based, of course, on the Ruth McKenney who wrote the non-fictional stories which inspired the play.
• The Framing Device of Man of La Mancha has Miguel de Cervantes himself having to make up parts of his story of Don Quixote as he goes along.
• Andrew from Sleuth has become wealthy as a successful writer of popular, though now old-fashioned, crime fiction novels, which feature an aristocratic amateur detective, St. John Lord Merridew.

Video Games

• Alan Wake is a Stephen King-esque writer who gets caught up in a scenario similar to his books. Penny Arcade explains.
  • The game also has a more direct invocation of this trope by having a character that's a game developer (who's in an insane asylum... with some pretty fun dialog). Interestingly, this happens very rarely in video games which seems to imply that video games seem to be one of the media that bucks the trend. Why this is is another question.
  • The books Alan is famous for are noir-inspired crime thrillers that are basically Max Payne, Remedy's previous series. They even have the same voice actor playing the character during voice-over "excerpts" of the books. A reader of Alan's says he's "a little heavy on the metaphors", which is the previous games' best-known feature.
• Interestingly, Catherine is a video game where the protagonist is a video game designer.
  • And for a bonus, romantic fidelity is big part of the story.
• Comix Zone is about a comic book writer whose Big Bad managed to trap him inside his own comic book.
• The title character in the Dana Knightstone series is a historical novelist.
• The protagonist from the Dark Seed games is a writer.
• Varric Tethras from Dragon Age II and Dragon Age: Inquisition writes books on the side, which are often thinly veiled retellings of his friends' adventures. The Framing Device in II is his telling a story about Hawke, and a side quest in Inquisition is about tracking down the last chapter of his attempt at a Romance Novel.
• The Dead Reckoning series of hidden object games from Eipix Entertainment usually has a writer of some sort as the player character. For example, in Sleight of Murder, the protagonist is a screenwriter, while in Death Between the Lines they're a novelist.
• Fatal Frame:
  • The first game has Junsei Takamine, who enters the cursed Himuro mansion for the sake of research for his next book. It ends horribly for him.
  • Kei Amakura from The Tormented is a non-fiction writer.
  • The fifth game has Ren Hojo, an anthor who heads into Mt. Hikami after coming across a photograph of a young girl he keeps seeing in his dreams.
  • The main character in Manor Memoirs is a writer having difficulties with her latest book.
• The titular character of the Gabriel Knight series writes supernatural mysteries which are "loosely based" on his own experiences.
• Adrienne Delaney from Phantasmagoria is a best-selling novelist, particularly well known for her book Blue Moon Rising.
• The only named protagonist of History Civil War: Secret Missions, Edward “Eric” Hogger, aspires to become a writer before the Civil War. The back-up short story of the game details possibly a page from Eric’s diary.
• The protagonist of Scratches, Michael Arthate, is a rising horror writer; In Last Visit the protagonist is an unnamed reporter.
• Segagaga is about running Sega as a company, producing and distributing games. Played with, however, as the characters in the company's games are real and help with development (Amigo from Samba de Amigo is a high-level programmer, for instance), the development process itself plays out like a normal video game, and past SEGA systems are actually spaceship-like weapons.
• Harry Mason from Silent Hill. Possibly not a very good one.
• Tokyo Tattoo Girls was developed by a subsidiary of the Nikkatsu movie company, and one of its main protagonists is Chocho Choufu, an aspiring actress that adores the types of movies Nikkatsu creates.
• Toonstruck stars the aptly named Drew Blanc, a struggling cartoonist.
• Gets VERY meta in Umineko: When They Cry. The games are, in fact, an IN-STORY novel, written by...THE CULPRIT, who in one scene in the manga version, is shown becoming the Witch Beatrice, as she realizes she can move people around like pawns on a gameboard. Though, 3-6 are written by a different person...who is also one of the main characters.
• The character OMORI from the video game title of the same name is a teenager with a penchant for writing and doodling. He literally has a book where he jots down his observations of his foes in a rather creative, yet dark way. He even has a skill where he can make an enemy sad with the use of a sad poem. This is a holdover from his original appearance in the Omoriboy comics, where he owned and wrote a blog in addition to his usual writing and drawing.

Webcomics

• Slick from Sinfest is sometimes seen trying to write a literary masterpiece. He also does poetry slams in the earlier strips.
• Davan of Something*Positive is, for a time, the writer of a webcomic. He also has a regular job as the personal assistant of a theatrical producer; this job on occasion makes use of his writing skills, such as when he has to rewrite a show's script.
• The Shakespeare character in Irregular Webcomic! works in an office doing some sort of writing, and writes Harry Potter Fan Fiction on the side.
  • Well, he is William Shakespeare, you know.
• Lynda Levac of Penny and Aggie is a columnist for a parenting website.
• David in Living with Insanity.
• In the modern arc of Arthur, King of Time and Space, Arthur writes a webcomic, as did Merlin until his death.
• Parson Gotti, the protagonist (See what they did there?) of Erfworld, has a webcomic of his own (kinda), hamstard.com. He's also a strategy gamer in what amounts to a world built on strategy game tropes.
• Doc Rat has a minor character who makes comics.
• Two of the five main characters of morphE are writers. Tyler Dawn is an English major who was trying to get published and Asia Ellis is a reporter.
• Gary, one of the lead trio of Ménage à 3, is a wannabe comics artist. In addition, Yuki, a major secondary character, is a wannabe comics writer (and the daughter of a manga creator), and sometimes collaborates with Gary. On top of that, Yuki, plus lead character Zii and secondary character Sonya, are in a band — and the comic's co-writer Gisèle Lagacé used to be a professional musician. (Sonya, the band's bass player, even looks a bit like Giz, who played bass.)
• The protagonist of Can't See Can't Hear But Love, Geun Soo, is a comic artist forced to quit after he starts going blind.

Web Original

• A Cracked article discusses how Hollywood films get other professions wrong by extrapolating from the experiences of Hollywood writers: 6 Things Movies Love to Get Wrong About the Workplace.
• The Icebox Radio Theatre is based out of the small town of International Falls, Minnesota. Their biggest show is Radio Icebox, a comedy-drama about a radio station set in the small town of Icebox, Minnesota, starring — among others — the creator of IBRT, Jeff Adams, as JJ, the station manager. The other show is Scoop Sisters Mysteries, about women running a paper in the small town of Icebox, Minnesota, who keep stumbling into mysteries. This seems to be a different Icebox from Radio Icebox, as are all the other shorts they keep making^note The ones set in Icebox. Which seems like most of them..
  • Both series have made a point about how hard it is to run such old media (radio theatre and print newspapers, respectively) in this high-tech, fast-paced, get it done yesterday world. IBRT doesn't have the benefit of the strange meteor in the lake that blocks outside radio and TV signals (and attracts weirdness). Presumably.
• Not writers, but the cast of Marble Hornets is mostly made of film students.
• WitchCraft SMP: Like her content creator counterpart, El documents her experiences in the competition to become Supreme Witch in the form of videos which she shares with others. In the epilogue, she finds her calling in content creation, and uses her illusion magic to manipulate the algorithm and make herself world-famous.

Western Animation

• Andy French of Mission Hill works at a mattress store, but he's an aspiring cartoonist. At least one episode deals with his discouragement over all the rejections he's gotten sending his comics to various magazines.
• Ginger Foutley of As Told by Ginger was a writer. The show specified that she was a gifted poet, but it was inferred that she was an all-around talented writer. She starts writing songs as she gets older.
• Mikey on Recess is a writer of epic poetry.
• Rugrats - Susie's father Randy is a writer for the Dummy Bears TV show in-universe.
• Doug is a writer and cartoonist; in fact, many episodes open and close with him writing in his journal.
• Daria is a talented writer, while her best friend Jane is an artist.
• Brian from Family Guy writes as a hobby, although he's not very good.
• BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob Waksberg noted this in an interview, observing that the show spent a lot of time satirising the production and acting sides of Hollywood but not much of the writers and that as a result, it could come across a little self-congratulatory. Therefore in season five, they introduced the character of Flip, the creator of a gritty prestige drama who is totally convinced of his own tortured genius despite most of his scripts coming out nonsensical. In a more traditional version of this trope, Diane is a genuinely earnest and capable writer.

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...Wait, so if most writers are writers, does that mean there's some writers who aren't writers?