Strange creatures, writers—and no two are quite the same. Scribblers of all kinds are at work across this collection, in which writing proves to be, for the reclusive perfectionist as much as the hedonistic socialite, so much more than words.

Inked not on paper but on skin, the unorthodox writing of Peter Greenaway’s dynamically erotic The Pillow Book (1995) bypasses the common fear of the blank page. Charlie Kaufman’s anxious avatar in Adaptation. (2002) has no such luck. Wrangling words onto new documents remains an obstinate problem for the fretful protagonist in this meta-film, which wallows hilariously in the screenwriter’s jealousy and insecurity. Aspiring novelists shine in Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things (2003) and Joachim Trier’s Reprise (2006). Seas and decades apart, the literary circles of 1930s London and contemporary Oslo nonetheless resemble one another in these Künstlerroman tales, as ambition frolics with revelry. In two films by American indie icons, the soulfulness of ramshackle poets comes instead to the fore. Different in many ways, the New Jersey bus driver in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016) and the Florida Keys drop out in Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum (2019) both take solace, even so, in meter and verse. Women also pick up authorial pens in this tome of a collection. Josephine Decker’s off-kilter biopic Shirley (2020) immerses itself in the shadowy mind of horror writer Shirley Jackson, while the pensive filmmaker in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island (2021) reflects on what it is to be among directorial giants and still remain an artist in one’s own right. Between the lines of books, poems, and scripts, the manifold lives of writers are so many volumes of thought and emotion, just waiting to be put into words.