Words are life-savers in "The Inhabited World," the strong, steady current of energy that keeps the novel going, keeps it generating those little flares of pleasure that get us all — writer, characters, readers — safely past the dark spots.
Honorable mentions to Philip Roth's character, Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in many of Roth's timeless novels, and to Stephen King's slew of tortured writers from The Shining, Misery, Bag of Bones, Salemm's Lot, Lisey's Story, The Dark Half and his many haunting short stories with writer characters.
Which is the biggest challenge for you as a writer: character, plot or language?
But Brooks introduced a magazine writer character, Jensen, as a counterpart to Capote.
With its comic sketches (and yes, there is a head writer), character-driven story lines and live broadcasts, "Raw" reminded Mr. Forte of his day job.
Still, a writer character allows you to strip away the layers and, at least in the mind of the novelist, get to the essentials of the human condition.
A lot of us do it, partly because it's what we know, partly because a writer character is, in the most limited sense, a free spirit.
"We're always trying to find things that come up against the material we're using that can allow it to be heard in the most practical way," said Ari Fliakos, who plays the central Writer character.
Bud Greenspan, award-winning filmmaker, writer, character and, arguably, the world's No. 1 fan of the Olympics, has died.
In his book It, King uses another writer character to espouse a kind of Ars Poetica about King's own kind of writing.
Was this a choice similar to the one in Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany's adaptation, in which the writer character (another surrogate for Capote in the book) becomes a hetero love interest for Holly Golightly in the movie?
