I suspect that writers make up a disproportionate number of characters in movies. At least, it seems that way! It’s not that writers don’t make good main characters — it’s just that there are so MANY movies about writers.
When I took a bunch of screenwriting classes in college, my professors always told me that making your main character a writer has the potential to be really boring. After all, writers tend to lead fairly solitary and uneventful professional lives. No one really wants to watch a movie of a writer sitting at a desk, typing away.
If someone were making a movie about my life right now, they’d see me living with my family and dogs, cleaning the house, moving between my desk and my big leather chair with my laptop, and typing away. Not exactly cinematic!
Even though teachers are prone to sharing that advice to “give your characters a job where they do a lot of visually interesting and social activities,” lots of screenwriters still create movies about writers. Maybe it’s just the temptation to write what you know, or maybe, there are some really great reasons to include a writer as a character.
A writer for TV Tropes proposed these reasons:
TV Tropes
- 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.
I can see where my professors were coming from, but I also feel like their advice falls into that category of “rules you can break after you understand why the rule is there.”
There are a lot of movie characters who are writers! This includes novelists, screenwriters, reporters, and more.
20 Main Characters Who Are Writers
- Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) is a failed science fiction writer in 2012.
- Larry (Billy Crystal) is a writer and teacher in Throw Mama From the Train.
- Christian (Ewan McGregor) is an aspiring writer in Moulin Rouge.
- Barton Fink (John Turturro) is a screenwriter in Barton Fink.
- Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) is based on the screenwriter of the movie, Charlie Kaufman, in Adaptation.
- Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a screenwriter in Sunset Boulevard.
- William Shakespeare is the protagonist in a number of movies, namely, Shakespeare in Love (in which he is played by Joseph Fiennes).
- Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) is a romance writer in Romancing the Stone.
- Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is a novelist in Before Sunset.
- Skeeter (Emma Stone) is a misguided journalist in The Help.
- Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is a novelist with writer’s block in The Shining.
- Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) is a crime writer in Basic Instinct.
- Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) is a grieving children’s book author in The Door in the Floor.
- Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) is a depressed novelist in Secret Window.
- Paul (George Peppard) is a struggling writer in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
- Gil (Owen Wilson) is a novelist in Midnight in Paris.
- Juliet Ashton (Lily James) is a novelist and article-writer in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
- William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is an aspiring music journalist in Almost Famous.
- Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) is a misanthropic writer in As Good as it Gets.
- Jo March (played by Saoirse Ronan in 2019 and Winona Rider in 1994) is an aspiring fiction writer in Little Women.
This list isn’t even a comprehensive one, yet it gives a pretty good overview of just how many writers show up in Hollywood movies!
One thing I would love to see change in this list, though, is a bit more representation of writers who aren’t just your typical writer cliche: a grumpy white man with trauma. Let’s see some more diversity in our writer-stories. Writers come from all walks of life, and their backgrounds are diverse and important. I hope to see some more creativity in depicting writers in future films.
