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An interesting rule of fiction is that, when it comes to a character who wants to write a book about something, they will always get published. It doesn't matter what their profession is- they could be an entomologist, a shoe-salesman, a retail clerk, whatever. Within a few minutes after mentioning the fact that they've completed the book we'll find out that they already have a publisher, and that the printing date is a few weeks from now.
The topic of this book will almost always be about the main characters and their adventures and personal achievements. Either that or it will be a thinly veiled work of fiction about their Captain Ersatz, with a high likelihood that the writer's counterpart will invoke Her Codename Was Mary Sue. Only very rarely do books written by main characters actually involve their areas of professional expertise.
Suffice to say, getting published in Real Life is nowhere near as easy. Publishing companies are notorious for their arbitrary selection process, and even assuming the book is as brilliant as all the characters say, it's not like being good at writing is an easy segue into actually getting published. Interestingly, the process is portrayed as quite difficult if the topic involves more than a couple of lines of expository dialog, making this similar in execution to an Instant Expert versus a character who must spend several episodes training.
Considering that most stories are written by writers one would think they'd know better. Regardless, this trope persists for one very simple reason- conflict. Books, especially tell-all books, are a great way of forcing characters to interact with each other, particularly the writer, in a very focused manner. The existence of this book, which people everywhere will read, creates privacy issues that must be somehow solved by the end of the plot. Rejection slips, unless a plot centerpoint, generally aren't that interesting.
Reasonably often this trope if justified by the connections the character in question has. If they're friends with a famous person, a famous person themselves, or know people involved in publishing circles, then getting published quickly is a fairly plausible task. Note that this will rarely, if ever, be stated outright.
This trope can actually be Truth in Television, as getting a self-published Vanity Title is a relatively simple task, and Eragon actually did become a bestseller in this manner. However, note that fictional portrayals usually involve proper publishing houses and that the vast majority of such start-ups are failures, a few large successes notwithstanding.
See also Who Would Want to Watch Us?.
Anime and Manga[]
- Hidamari Sketch has Sae, who seems to fit both "easy bestseller" and "easily published" definitions. She's a high school student who seems to have a fairly successful writing career at 15/16 years old (and she's been at it for a while, so was presumably even younger when first published.) She also seems to write pretty quickly - which is Justified; her reason why she's in the art department (so that she can draw illustrations for her own novels) means she's writing the Light Novel sort of work.
- Averted in the audio drama Year 2003 -Summer- for Digimon Adventure 02. Takeru's memorandum about their adventures ended up delayed because of his difficulty in writing it objectively.
Comic Books[]
- Aversion: In the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, a struggling young writer is unable to successfully publish anything until he acquires a bezoar and gives it to an older, accomplished writer. This is the price for the slavery of the muse Calliope, and once the younger writer starts raping her on a regular basis, he's able to create modern masterpieces. (Unfortunately for him, Calliope happens to be the mother of the title character's only child, and once he finds out...)
Film[]
- Hannah and Her Sisters has Holly who writes two plays over the course of the movie as a part of her recovery. The first one she sets aside because Hannah was upset about how much the characters resembled her family, but the second one (based on a subplot she had had earlier in the film) is produced. This is, however, due to the support of Mickey, who works in theater production.
- Averted in the film Sideways. During a wine connoisseur tour, Miles is frequently in contact with his agent, who is trying to find a paying publisher for his book. Eventually, the agent finally tells him that she's giving up and he causes a public scene in his frustration.
Literature[]
- In Discworld there are published books on every subject imaginable, giving the impression that anyone can get their book out there. Titles include
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Anecdotes of the Great Accountants, Vols 1-3 |
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- Possibly justified if most books are written by the wizards of Unseen University, who are encouraged to write (or eat, or sleep, or anything else) as a distraction from actually practicing magic.
- Ben Bova's Cyberbooks averts this when following the fate of three books, being set in the publishing industry. An manuscript for a horror novel by an established writer is described as complete rubbish, but a guaranteed cash-cow. It gets a massive launch and much promotion. A WWII memoir by an unknown retired naval captain is accepted, but bowldlerised and mangled, creeps out onto the shelves and is ultimately pulped. The third is The Great American Novel, whose author has become so frustrated with the lack of response that he sets off to extract answers from the publishers, becoming a major plot point.
Live Action TV[]
- Liz Lemon in Thirty Rock published a book called Dealbreakers which, while not about the people in her life, still affected them negatively because of women interpreting the things the book says as good advice for relationships- even though Liz herself is notoriously poor with such relationships. Portrayed more plausibly than most examples- a publishing company approaches her with the idea based on a sketch she wrote for TGS, and the book is written off-screen in between seasons.
- In one episode of Star Trek: Voyager we learn that the Doctor has been working to get his holo-novel published. While he insists it's fictional it's hard to escape the fact that, among other things, the clearly evil oppressive characters in the book look like identical (but more evil) copies of the actual Voyager crew. Of course, this being both the first holo-novel written by a hologram and the only writing we know of made by a member of Voyager's crew, it does make sense that it would be published for those reasons alone. Try not to think too hard about how publishing is supposed to work in a scarcity-free society.
- Timothy McGee on NCIS is a successful author under a pseudonym whose first book (at least) had versions of the other characters that raised eyebrows when they found out. However, this example may be an aversion in that you don't know how long it took him to get the book published, and when his writing has come up in later episodes it's shown that it isn't an easy process and he actually works at it.
- They also established he'd been devoted to writing for some time before it ever came up that he'd finished a book.
- Averted in Stargate SG-1 in the episode "Citizen Joe," when Joe, a barber forms a mental connection to O'Neill via Ancient technology and becomes obsessed with trying, unsuccessfully, to publish the stories of SG-1's exploits in various magazines.
- Averted in the X Files Day in The Limelight episode "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man." A running subplot shows him submitting his novels to various publishers and getting rejection letters (one advised him to burn his manuscript), but he's finally published - in a low-rent Playboy equivalent where they edited in a lot of sex scenes that he never wrote and changed the ending. He was looking forward to chucking it all and becoming a full-time professional writer until he realized what happened.
- In Sean's Show, Sean Hughes writes a very long suicide note, but then leaves for somewhere else. When he returns, one of his friends has had the note published as a novel.
- On Bones, somehow Sweets is able to get a book published about psychoanalyzing two people who aren't massively famous or of interest to most of the world. Um, who would want to read this, again?
- Booth may not be that famous, but Bones is a multimillionaire best selling author. Some people might want to read about her issues.
- In the short-lived show Legend, the title character (or rather, the writer who published under the title character's name) got out of a gunfight by promising the man who wanted to duel the famous (and fictitious) Nicodemus Legend a deal with his publisher for a book series about his real-life exploits.
- A major plot arc in the fifth season of Babylon 5 was G'Kar going on a diplomatic mission to Centauri Prime for maybe a month, during which time the unfinished manuscript he had been working on for two years was discovered, published, and sold more than half a million copies. Since the manuscript was a religious tract, he found himself considered a modern-day prophet upon his return, to his great dismay.
Newspaper Comics[]
- Michael in For Better or For Worse has little trouble getting his books published. In fact, he's even able to support a family on this (normally highly unreliable) income extremely quickly. One of the more justifiable criticisms leveled at the comic in its waning years was about how he received a sizeable cash advance for his first novel, which had been read and edited only by his mother.
- Averted by Peanuts. Snoopy spends most of the strip's run trying and failing to get a publisher interested in his works. For his part, the publisher keep sending increasingly angry letters demanding that Snoopy stop pestering them, culminating in cheap pranks and the ultimate rejection letter, "Dear contributor, we've noticed that you have not submitted anything to us for some time. Thank you, that suits our present needs."
Theater[]
- In the 10-Minute Play Sun Dried, this is actually in that Mary Louise simply cannot get published despite her best efforts which include "camping on [the publishers'] doorsteps". It is then pointed out that she's not writing anything interesting in the first place.
Video Games[]
- In The Sims 2, if you have a Sim write a book it will automatically get published, and as long as the character has enough creativity points, every book they write will be a bestseller. The same goes for The Sims 3.
Western Animation[]
- Averted in Family Guy, where Brian's results at writing are mediocre at best, and result only in his works being mocked, or massively modified (i.e. his screenwriting being used for porn-flicks, or his serious TV-script being made into a crude sitcom).
- On South Park, the boys wonder why The Catcher in The Rye was so controversial and decide to write something far more objectionable. The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs is instantly published and becomes a runaway hit, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that no one can get through a single paragraph without throwing up.