While watching "Write Where It Hurts" last night on noggin, I was thinking the entire episode is actually a subtle homage to the film 8 1/2 (Fellini 1963).
In 8 1/2 we have a protagonist as a director stuggling to write the screenplay for his next film wherein we, the audience, get to see "failed" attempts as actual scenes in "our" movie. Many of these scenes either in an allegorical or literal flashback sense speak to the various personal problems the protagonist is facing at the time. This goes on switching between the normal narrative and these scenes until finally in the last such scene we get to see him direct all the elements of his life into a more or less happy synthesis with which he can come to terms. This is a pretty poor summary of this fine film (and you shouldn't be relying on my description if you haven't seen it yourself, go see it now!).
So if you replace "director" with "writer" and "film" with "story" you have a pretty strong similarity to WWIH, with the added original element of some of the work-in-progress scenes being parodies. What makes the strongest connection for me, however, is the ending scene of both wherein the protagonists reach a deeper level of understanding themselves by first figuring out what they _really_ want for their live and second leveraging their art into expressing their vision of it.
Also, this is far more of a stretch, but in WWIH we hear that Daria is, we guess, married to (or perhaps I should say "marry-dateship thing") someone named Marcello. The protagonist of 8 1/2 is played by Marcello Mastroianni.
Unless I'm crazy (and please don't hold back pointing out as such) and contriving coincidences here, I think this is just one of a couple of different references to Fellini throughout the series. In Fire! we have Daria/Jane/Tom talking about a Fellini film festival, mentioning La Dolce Vita, and Tom even briefly mentions the ending and it's symbolic dead fish washing up on shore. (side note: Was that actually a fish? I thought it looked more like big squid or something.)