19 Documentaries About Writers That'll Help You Get Your Mojo Back

A friend of mine recently mentioned the documentary about Tim O’Brien called The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien. He raved about it, so, like the Tim O’Brien fanboy I am, I went on cable to watch it, saw it cost money, and then found that it was free on an app called Pluto. Naturally, not wanting to spend any more on cable than I already do, that’s where I went. I now have an app called Pluto that I'd never heard about on my TV. Anyway, the documentary follows O’Brien, who hasn’t written a book in 15 years, working on, or trying to get back to, writing a new book. We learn the reason for his extended absence away from writing (though smoking two packs a day is apparently something he did not stop doing), is that he and his wife had children, and he wanted to be a good dad to them. If you’re a parent, and you’re a writer, you know how difficult it is to do both things—raising your children and writing at the same time. I know I do. Since watching documentaries has helped me, I've compiled a list of 19 documentaries about writers that'll help you get your mojo back. Or at least I hope they do. If you're in a slump, or just curious, watch one. Or all of them--they're worth it. They're probably on one or multiple of the different apps/channels you have, so they may require a little searching. But they're worth it. The titles are:

1. Margaret Atwood: Once in August

2. The Charles Bukowski Tapes

3. Breakfast with Hunter

4. Salinger

5. And Everything is Going Fine

6. Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth

7. Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life

8. Amos Oz: The Nature of Dreams

9. Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak

10. William S. Burroughs: A Man Within

11. Hemingway: A Portrait

12. How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer

13. Trumbo

14. No Maps for These Territories

15. Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles

16. The Pigeon Tunnel

17. Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No

18. Dreams with Sharp Teeth

19. Ferrante Fever

But back to the Tim O'Brien one. While O’Brien is best known for The Things They Carried, his linked stories about the Vietnam War, my favorite novel of his is In the Lake of the Woods, which is about a Vietnam veteran’s failed United States Senate campaign. I find it to be a haunting novel and one of those rare finds that inspires me to try to shoot for something of greater substance in my writing. But the documentary itself is inspiring, and not just because O’Brien is such a great writer. What’s inspiring about it, to me, is how clearly it shows how much O’Brien, who won the National Book Award for Fiction and who’s published ten books, continues to struggle with the act of writing.

Here's one example, and maybe you can relate: the filmmakers capture O’Brien waking up at one in the morning one day to write, but, because of his struggling at the writing part of actually writing, he decides to clean the kitchen floor instead. He drops paper towels across the nice big tiles, gets down on his ass, and scrubs away at the tiles and the grout lines in a meticulous fashion like Indiana Jones wiping away dust from the Crystal skull of Akator. It’s a shocking visual that’s only a tiny portion of his procrastination, but it shows how human this titan of fiction is when he’s not able to achieve what he wants to achieve when it comes to the written word.

While I personally don’t believe in writer’s block, I understand O'Brien's frustration—because that’s exactly what he’s going through, the frustration of not being able to write what he wants to write. If you’re like me (and, apparently, like Tim O’Brien), you look for things to occupy your time until you can get back to the dreaded desk in hopes of having that magical muse return so you can get your ass back to work. One of my tried and true go-tos are watching documentaries about other writers. I find them fascinating. Yes, it’s great to learn things about your literary idols that you may not have otherwise known, but the documentaries are also informational, because you get to understand that while your idols are your idols because they’ve written fantastic books, they’re also writers going through the same things that we as writers go through. It emphasizes the fact that we aren’t alone, that we’re not special, that the process, while perhaps varying a little from writer to writer, is basically the same—we write, we rewrite, we edit, we start and drop new projects, we fret and moan and suffer and convince ourselves we're failures, and then we rinse and repeat ad infinitum. It's a reminder to us that there is no magic solution, no God given magical potion to getting the words down on the page other than just writing them down and working on them for as long as it takes us to get it right. And that’s something we, as writers, need to appreciate and respect every time we get down on ourselves.

Since I mention magic, one of the curious things I learned about O’Brien by watching the documentary is that the man is a magician. Literally. In the documentary we get to watch O’Brien perform card tricks and vanishing tricks and a number of other standard magic tricks you’ve seen countless times in Vegas or on America’s Got Talent or wherever. Magic is O’Brien’s second passion, and he seems to be pretty darn good at it. He's popping cards out of thin air, making large metal rings float in the air, and impaling his kids in front of friends and family as if they're possessed beings from some Wes Craven movie. And still, with everything he has to sidetrack him from not being able to write, with all of the acclaim and published masterpieces and support, he still, as a writer, struggles to put the words on the page. What we learn, what is reinforced by O'Brien, is that we're not alone. Struggle is part of the process of writing, and we all have different ways of coping with it. His is magic and cleaning. Your coping mechanisms may be something else. Hopefully you're beyond the drinking and drugs cliché of writing (though no, I'm not making any judgments here).

--Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Anyway, what’s great about the documentaries I list above is not only how diverse the selection of writers are, but also how the documentary filmmakers showcase how human and relatable these icons of literature are to other writers as they're filmed in their homes, their apartments, out on the street. Yes, a great many of these writers are eccentric in their own ways, but who of us aren’t? Writers, from my experience, or at least fiction writers, tend to be a little different than other people walking around out there in the world. We have a passion that’s not taught to us (for the most part) but rather something that is within us, even those of us who've studied writing and gotten degrees in writing. We write because we can’t not write. We write because there’s something within us pulling at our strings that comes from somewhere deep within who we are. And, if you’re like me, we often feel alone, like we’re on some solitary island in the middle of nowhere and there’s no real need to write SOS in the sand because we know no one is going to come along and save us. We are solitary creatures. We can be hermits. We can be ornery. But in a way, it's because we have to be. We're writers, and writers write; we don’t (normally) sit around a group of other people pouring their hearts and souls out onto the page. For us, people are a distraction. People get in the way, children included, even when we love them more than life itself, which we do. For us, we only need clear minds and something to write with—a pen, a stack of paper, a typewriter, a computer. (Some of us even write in crayon). We're simple like that, but out of that simplicity comes our expression, our art, what we have to offer to the world that is the most important thing we have to give of ourselves.

In The Things They Carried, O’Brien writes, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.” And he’s right. We chase those spirits in our heads, however elusive those spirits may be. We persist, without the promise of reward or even publication. We don’t cease writing because we’ve hit a hurdle or two or ten; like the characters we put so much energy into, we face the hurdles head on, and we either overcome those hurdles or we don't, yet when we don't, we simply take another route, only to (most probably) face many more. And that? That’s writing. We are the heroes, the protagonists of our own lives, of our own journeys, and we need to see how our stories end. So, if you want to see how some of the protagonists of the writing world live their lives, how they struggle to write and encounter fame and, sometimes, fortune and tragedy, I recommend watching a few of the above documentaries about writers and the journeys they take every single time they sit before a blank page ready to set out on their individual paths to discovery. You never know: one of them just may light the right fire under your ass just when you need it the most.

Cully Perlman is an author, blogger, and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com