Against Metafiction

Naturally, there are no hard rules to the art of fictions, but one thing which is best avoided is having a protagonist who is a novelist or--even worse--a poet. I suppose that Mario Vargas Llosa almost always uses a novelist as his main character, but the problem with that sort of fiction is that the fictional characters can only be as good as their creators. Hence, Thomas Mann can write about whoever he wants, because he's the Mann, but I wouldn't recommend that a first-time novelist try to write a novel relating the life of a great poet. Writers aren't very interesting people anyway; that's why we write about other people (even though the memoir, as opposed to the autobiography, has made navel-gazing respectable.)