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Can An Author Be a Protagonist, Too? 8 Novels with Authors as Main Characters

By Hank Phillippi Ryan
CanAuthorsbeaProtagonist_NovelSuspects

My pitch was not going well. Happily, it was just to an agent-friend, and not to my real agent, and my career did not hang in the balance. But it felt like it did. I told him that I thought it was my great idea for a thriller, and held my breath.

The agent looked at me, with sorrow in his eyes, and said: “It’s the death knell.”

“What’s the death knell?” I was terrified. Death knell for who? Me?

“When writers write about writers, that means they’ve run out of ideas,” he pronounced. “It’s static and interior and come on, Hank, people want action.”

I began to fret. It had seemed like a good idea at the start, but then, hmm. I worried that writing about a writer means your main character is someone who is often simply sitting at a computer. Having life and death struggles over dangling modifiers and sentence fragments. How exciting can that be? 

And yet, and yet, what could be more fascinating than writing about a writer? One who pursues universal truths, a person who is trying to change the world, who is talented and persuasive and thoughtful, and determined. (And talk about suspense, a writer is someone who, in a wild act of perilous bravery, lives or dies at the whim of agents, editors, publishers—and the all-powerful reader.)

Trying to be brave, I ignored my agent-friend and persevered. How, I wondered, could I turn typing words on page into a page turner?

In All This Could Be Yours, I went way meta and super-personal and invited readers to travel with a debut author on a book tour gone terrifying. And trust me, if you have been an author on book tour, or if you’ve even been in the audience at a book event, All This Could Be Yours will reveal not only the joys, but the deadly dark side of being an author. Might writing a best-selling novel about to ruin my main character’s life? After all, what she writes is her own truth. And sometimes, that’s dangerous. 

So writing about a writer? I say it’s not the death knell. I say it’s the proof our community will devour a good story about how good stories are created. 

And here are just a few of the other authors who dismissed the fear of the death knell… and came up with a ringing best-seller about a writer.

And hey, look what recently made the Times list? Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life. About two writers! So—it can work. Writing about writing may be the perfect solution to your next plot. And it’s obviously what readers love.

Your next read is waiting…

  1. The Unlikely Detectives: Books to Read if You Loved ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ Series

  2. Why I’ll Never Stop Writing Thrillers Set in Louisiana

  3. What’s Wrong with the Baby?: Why Children Make the Best Monsters

USA Today bestselling author HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN is the author of 16 psychological thrillers. She’s won five Agatha Awards, five Anthony Awards, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. As on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, she’s won an unprecedented thirty-seven Emmy Awards, as well as many more journalism honors. A past president of National Sisters in Crime and a board member of International Thriller Writers, Ryan lives in Boston. Her upcoming novel is the cat-and-mouse suspense All This Could Be Yours, about a debut author on a terrifying book tour from hell. People magazine calls it “a nail-biting thriller.”