I confess that I once wrote a gothic mystery novel entitled The Birds Began to Sing with a writer protagonist, but I don't think it is guilty of falling into the traps you describe here. It's about an aspiring author who enters a mysterious writing competition to write the ending of an unpublished manuscript by a famous deceased author. To do this, she has to spend several days under very specific and peculiar competition rules in a remote gothic mansion near Dartmoor - the ancestral family home of the aforementioned deceased famous author - along with the other competitors. Then things start to get weird.