'...Creative writing courses are another way of introducing drama. The interaction between a sardonic has-been and his uninterested students has inspired three of the better films about writers. In Danny DeVito's Throw Momma from the Train (1987), Billy Crystal played a blocked novelist who could get no further in his novel than "The night was..." and had to explain to one of his students why "100 Girls I'd Like to Pork" was a bad idea for a coffee-table book (in a throwaway joke, the published book could later be glimpsed on Crystal's desk).

In Wonder Boys (2000), adapted from Michael Chabon's novel, Michael Douglas was an award-winning procrastinator, seven years late delivering his latest novel. From the editor who showed up to the university's literary event with a transvestite to the pretentious novelist (the brilliant Rip Torn) who got a round of applause from a festival audience merely for announcing "I... am an author" with great solemnity, this film had the painful ring of truth.

But the most disturbing creative-writing-course movie is Todd Solondz's Storytelling (2001), the first 26 minutes of which showed the worst that can happen within a dysfunctional writing group. The Pulitzer-prize winning Mr Scott (played by Robert Wisdom) destroys his students' egos with brutal criticism and indulges in aggressive sex with the liberal white female students he believes are attracted to him because he's black. And every bad creative writing group has someone like Catherine who'll say in a gentle voice, "Maybe I'm wrong, it's just my opinion, but..." before launching into a volley of the most vitriolic criticism.

...Jack Nicholson has portrayed several writers, including the real-life Eugene O'Neill in Warren Beatty's Reds (1981), a fictional Washington Post journalist in Heartburn (1986) and two author-monsters: Melvin in As Good as It Gets (1997) and Jack in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980).

Melvin and Jack are collections of tics, madness and memorable lines. Melvin's best quip, spoken to a mohair-sweatered blonde receptionist who wants to know how he writes women so well, is: "I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability." [Sounds like a university football coach.]'