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I don't love stories about writing stories. I also don't love plays about putting on plays.

I've tended to be okay with songs about writing songs and movies about making movies. Songs about writing songs- or more often about being a singer- are if nothing else short and often different enough to be interesting. Usually it's hard for various reasons- your country singers are under appreciated, but hopeful and playing for beer and hot wings, your rocker types are burned out on drugs before they can hit the apex of their dream, your lyricists are struggling and living life but eventually putting out something beautiful and utterly unappreciated, your rappers have various haters disrespecting their distinct, fresh style (but what can you do? Haters gonna hate). Movies about movies tend to have some fun, comedically overblown characters, inventive slapstick, and sometimes even a little social commentary, and all of the same holds true for movies about putting on plays. It probably also helps that it comes in a couple of different flavors- the slapstick, the faux documentary, the literary allusion comedy, the thinly veiled jab at real folk, the play within a play, and so on.

Actual plays within actual plays, however, have always kind of put me off. This could very well be selection bias, because I haven't seen a lot of great ones, but I think it's more that it very often seems to me to be by theatre people for theatre people- like the whole thing is a sly wink at a very specific audience as if to say "oh, YOU know how it is." Except I'm not actually a theatre person, so I don't, and more often than not I come away with the feeling that the people who chose to put on the play didn't think anything else could ever be as interesting or important as their own particular art form.

Writing about writing tends to have the same problem, but magnified by the fact that when you put on a play, you at least have a group of people, but a writer writes alone. Without moving around much. And without a great deal of variety in execution. The writer sits down in front of a computer or typewriter, either has something to say immediately or frets until she does, tries to say what she means, then sends it off, often to rejections. And, yes, not having an idea is hard, and yes, rejections hurt and you get discouraged- and that's so often the conflict point people go with: characters who are convinced their writing isn't good enough or maybe they're not cut out to be a writer. It's not as if there aren't times when lonely self-pity is a wonderful conflict to follow, but perhaps it's because this is something I've done myself that I have less sympathy. Perhaps because it's something I've done myself, I have trouble swallowing a lot of the mystical virtuousness people sometimes seem to be trying to get across when they talk about writing. (Off the top of my head, my favorite work in which the main character is a writer is "the Rum Diaries" by Hunter S. Thompson, which is about being a journalist, and is honestly mostly about being Hunter S. Thompson, which is a different thing all together.)

It's funny, on reflection I would love to see a story about a writer who so desperately believed in their story that they were engaged in all sorts of wacky hijinks to make sure it got into the hands of someone who would appreciate it. Breaking into publishing offices, baking it into a cake like a jailhouse file or something. I wouldn't mind seeing a story about an author who was actually horrible, perhaps even self-awarely so, but persisted in torturing the world with the time travelling adventures of Gracknar, the unicorn-riding space barbarian- particularly if it was cleverly written. I think it might be fun to see a story about someone who wrote stories for hot wings and beer, because they had some special relationship with the restaurant owner and he at least liked the writer's stories. I think it would be fun to read a story that chronicled two rival authors taking pot shots at each other in their stories, the way you can watch a rap battle unfold across five or six songs, sometimes albums. I'd love to see a story about someone who takes up writing just to impress the boy or girl of their dreams, and wins success and resentment at something they never really meant to be good at. I wouldn't mind a story where someone has to hide their identity in order to publish and can't enjoy their success as themselves. Or one where they publish something they believe is reprehensible for giant piles of money. Or one where they publish something noble and true and dangerous even though they live in a time or place where it may very well get them killed.

But none of that ever seems to be the story anyone writes about writing. It always seems to revolve around the lonely, quiet nobility of the struggling artist, and the demon of self-doubt they have to move beyond in order to pursue what is so often less a dream than a compulsion.

Somewhere along the way, I got really tired of that story.