I read recently read two books that had writers as their main protagonists:
- Death Of The Author by Nnedi Okorafor, and
- Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang.
They were both perfectly fine. But I found it hard to get really involved in either narrative. The stakes just never felt that high.
Not that high stakes a pre-requisite for a gripping narrative. I enjoyed the films The Social Network and Like A Complete Unknown. Those stakes couldn’t be lower. One is about a website that might’ve ripped off its idea from another website. The other is about someone who’d like to play different kinds of music but other people would rather he played the same music. It’s a credit to the writers and directors of both films that they could create compelling stories from such objectively unimportant subjects.
Getting back to those two books, maybe there’s something navel-gazey when writers write about writing. Then again, I really like non-fiction books about writing from Ann Lamott, Stephen King, and more.
Perhaps it’s not the writing part, but the milieu of publishing.
I’m trying to think if there are any great films about film-making (Inception doesn’t count). Living In Oblivion is pretty great. But a lot of its appeal is that it’s not taking itself too seriously.
All too often when a story is set in its own medium (a book about publishing; a film about film-making) it runs the risk of over-estimating its own importance.
The most eye-rolling example of this is The Morning Show, a television show about a television show. It genuinely tries to make the case for the super-important work being done by vacuous morning chat shows.