The 10 Best Movies About Writers

Movies about writers can be really motivating and inspiring if you’re a writer yourself. It’s important to be reminded that others struggle to write and it’s a long process to write something worthy. With that in mind, here are ten movies about writing that are entertaining and offer good lessons about writing that will help motivate and inspire you.

1. Misery

This 1990 movie is about a best-selling author who wants to focus on more serious novels, but finds himself held against his will in the home of a crazed fan. This fan is obsessed with his work as a romance novelist and he discovers it may be difficult to switch careers.

2. Midnight in Paris

Keane Young, a movie blogger at Australia2Write and Next Coursework, shares that “this movie stars Owen Wilson in the role of Gil Pender, who is a successful screenwriter but unhappy in his life and struggling to write his first book. While on vacation in Paris, he ends up time travelling to the 1920s and meeting literary geniuses from that era.”

3. Sunset Boulevard

This is a 1950 film about a hack writer trying to become famous in Hollywood. He meets a silent movie star who’s been out of the spotlight for years and is hired by her to write a screenplay for her comeback to the big screen.

4. I Remember Mama

Another older film, from 1948, about a young aspiring writer who shares her tale of growing up in San Francisco the child of Norwegian immigrants. Although they aren’t a wealthy family, they worked hard to have a loving home for the family. The main character’s mother is shown as a powerful woman who is very encouraging of her daughter’s literary ambitions.

5. Finding Forrester

This suggestion comes from Dave Wilson, a creative writer at Brit Student and Write My X, who explains that “this movie is about a teenager from the inner-city who has a gift for writing. He becomes friends with an introverted, anti-social author named William Forrester who helps him become a better writer.”

6. Ace in the Hole

The plot of this film revolves around a disgraced reporter from the big city who is relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico to work for a small-town newspaper. The cynical reporter tries to win back his old job by sensationalizing a story about a rescue attempt for a man stuck in a cave and turns the whole thing into a circus.

7. Almost Famous

This movie is about a 15-year-old wannabe rock journalist who lands an amazing job opportunity to write a story for Rolling Stone. The assignment is to follow a new rock band on the road and write about their concert tour. Set in the 1970s, this journalist quickly learns that fame and fortune isn’t all it appears to be and there is a dark side.

8. Julie & Julia

This movie is about a woman who starts blogging in 2002 to showcase her attempts to make every Julia Child recipe in the cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, all in the same year. Throughout the film there are flashbacks of Julia Child in the 1950s starting out on her culinary career path. It’s an inspirational story for any aspiring blogger.

9. The Lost Weekend

This 1945 film is about a has-been writer who struggles with alcoholism and ends up going on a four-day bender. This is a film about struggling with perfectionism, and self-doubt, and is the film to watch for those struggling with writer’s block. Many famous authors have struggled with alcohol addition and this movie shows that they don’t get helped by it but it also cripples them further.

10. Stranger Than Fiction

This is a 2006 movie about Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell, who learns he might be a character in a novel. He is an average IRS auditor but all of a sudden hears a voice start narrating his life. This movie is fun to watch for fiction writers, because even though it doesn’t really give any advice about writing, it helps you understand how to write developed characters that can become completely different than what you originally envisioned.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Michael Dehoyos is a content marketer and editor for PhD Kingdom and Academic Brits. He enjoys writing about various topics and encouraging others to pursue writing goals. His blogs are featured in many publications, and his work can also be found at Coursework Help.