How to Become a Writer

Though “How to Become a Writer” is told in imperative voice as a guide for readers hoping to be writers, it is actually a close second-person account of an aspiring writer’s life through middle age. One of its central themes is Identity Through Purpose, shown here to be a sickness, a need or obsession to write, rather than a calling in one’s life that can bring joy. In fact, at the end of the story, the narrator has Francie comparing being a writer to having polio, as if it is a debilitating disease without a cure.

The central conflict of the story revolves around Francie’s desire to be a writer because—despite causing her to become somewhat sickly—the only happiness she has in life is creating a new story no one has read before. The people around her, most notably her mother, do not want her to become a writer. Her father tells her it is the “age of computers,” hoping she will work in that field. Everyone wants something else for her. And later, when she is a published writer, even she pines for the days when she was a simple child psychology major.

The narrative, organized in so-called steps to becoming a writer, gives advice throughout: count syllables, stick to comedies, wonder what you are interested in, go to law school. Interspersed with these commands, Moore gives richly detailed descriptions of vignettes from Francie’s life, writing through high school, college, and as an adult who lives off cashed-in savings bonds while devoting her time to writing.

The juxtaposition of these two distinct narrative techniques creates movement between the distant ambiguity of these so-called steps to being a writer and the detailed closeness Moore offers regarding Francie’s fate once she actually becomes one. “Quit classes. Quit jobs” (37) becomes personal after Francie has taken these steps. Rather than live the exciting life one might assume a writer lives, she spends her time vacuuming, eating cough drops, and collecting fragments of writing to possibly use later. There is a slight desperation in the description of Francie drinking coffee and eating coleslaw at the Howard Johnson. But then through that coleslaw, Francie is transported because she experiences the power of art and language in the smallest of things, whether they be a bowl of coleslaw, a menu, or her date’s arm hair.

In Francie’s romantic relationships, as well as in the narrator’s wry asides, “How to Become a Writer” explores the difference between Sex Versus Romantic Love. The characters are both hopeful of true love and relationships, yet also acknowledge that they are doomed. As a teenager, Francie searches the house where she babysits for sex manuals and wonders how people who love one another can share such strange acts with one another. When she loses her virginity in college, she writes about it for a creative writing class saying, “It created a new space, which hurt and cried in a voice that wasn’t mine, ‘I’m not the same anymore, but I’ll be okay’” (20). The sex act is only mentioned in relation to the story she tells about it, which shows that for Francie, and perhaps the narrator, experiences gain meaning once they are incorporated into a story.

Francie’s college boyfriend encourages her to bike when she spends too much time writing, showing that he does not really understand her or her need to write. Her friend, in turn, tells her to get a new boyfriend. Later, when partygoers ask Francie what she writes about, her roommate exclaims that she writes about her “dumb boyfriend,” and Francie is annoyed because she knows it is true.

When Francie breaks up with her boyfriend, she chooses men who will use her for sex rather than love her, which the narrator says will enrich Francie’s stories. As she continues to write, she also continues to date, mostly men who do not understand her purpose as a writer, and instead ask inane questions like how she gets story ideas or whether life as a writer is “discouraging.” Sitting across from a boring date, the story ends as Francie sees herself as intrinsically separate from him.

Though the story plays with form, its style and settings are firmly realist, such as through domestic household scenes in the interactions between Francie and her mother as well as descriptions and mini-scenes of parties, where the narrative relies on snippets of conversation like, “Oh, you write? What do you write about?” (23) as if these lines have been overheard by the reader. Dialogue is almost always directly related to Francie’s writing, whether partygoers are asking her about it or her friends and parents are trying to steer her away from it. The association of direct speech with the theme of writing points to Francie’s obsession and suggests that she only clearly remembers things in relation to her writing.

The use of the imperative, mixed with close detailed narration of Francie’s life, gives the sense that every sentence or action is telling two stories at once, one referring back to the other. There is the story of the “you” or the reader, who will potentially follow these steps, while at the same time, we have Francie who at times follows the steps and at times does not, showing us that there is no one way to become a writer. At the same time that these two stories are unfolding, the writer is playing with the literary elements which make up the short story form, discussing the importance of literary devices like metaphor, character, and plot, while at the very same time, deflecting their importance by writing a story that relies not on plot, but on its structure to do the telling.

In “How to Become a Writer,” Moore reinterprets the literary short story form, parodying the self-help and “how to” genre, mixing the two forms to create a hybrid form, both personal and distant. This new style demands the reader’s attention and creates humor through parody and the breaking of formal expectations. The writer of this story, whether it is truly an older more mature version of Francie or not, dissolves any real attempt at plot, unlike the younger Francie who creates elaborate and disastrous events for her characters to deal with. The action that takes place in this story is only imagined for Francie, refusing to reveal if any of the events are actually “true” within the story. In this way, the narrative defies the normal rules of the short story form.

“How to Become a Writer” deals with both domestic and personal concerns, yet also interrogates the relationship between everyday life and art, and the everyday lives of artists. “How to Become a Writer” asks how a writer—especially a woman writer—might navigate the demands of being a writer with the other demands of life.