On the Writer and Ruby Sparks

Is writing the least glamorous glamorous job that one can hold? You may walk red carpets, mingle with celebrities, travel round the world and earn money to make life a comfortable experience, but in many cases remain anonymous. Without your work the finished product doesn’t exist, yet once it does and it is out there, an audience unfamiliar and uninterested unconsciously casts you aside with your methods, as do a press concerned only with the ‘names’ of entertainment.

Ruby Sparks concerns itself with a rare creature, the novelist who has achieved recognisable fame.  Fame he doesn’t necessarily crave. Yet, he is still portrayed as we expect writers to be portrayed; an indoors type, lonely, bookish (obviously) and out of place in a gym. Despite this stereotypical presentation, Ruby Sparks is mostly about writing, the pleasures, the difficulties and the dreams of writers. When we meet the film’s protagonist he is writing using a typewriter, despite this being the 21^st Century; he is anachronistic. Not just in his equipment, but also in his approach to love, believing in the magic of romance (a magic that becomes literal).

As the film progresses, his love of writing and of what his writing manifests reveals its true nature, its difficulties and complications. He writes less and when he does it is not for love of writing, but for a need to control his writing from spiralling out of his control. By the end of the film, he has come to learn that the magic of writing and of love does not exist in a romantic ideal somewhere located in the past, but exists in the present where it requires work and constant attention. He swaps his typewriter for a MacBook Pro and writes his next great novel.