How to Become a Writer

“First, try to be something, anything, else.”

The imperative second person point of view and voice here speak directly to the reader, stripping away the typical distance between narrator and reader. Also, the insinuation that becoming a writer is so horrible that any other chosen profession must be better is an example of hyperbole. This line also uses humor, parodying the self-help, how-to genre implied in the title.

“Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age—say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire.”

These lines further the hyperbole of the first line. As the first paragraph continues, the intellectual suffering described plays with the stereotype of the teenage writer drawn to haikus, writing about desire. There is also a mix of high and low diction creating texture in the prose with the juxtaposition of the informal, “say, fourteen,” with the more academic, “critical disillusionment. This creates humor and points to the difference between the teenager and their aspirations.”

“Write a short story about an elderly man and woman who accidentally shoot each other in the head, the result of an inexplicable malfunction of a shotgun which appears mysteriously in their living room one night.”

Francie’s notoriously bad plot devices serve a dual purpose in this story. “How to Become a Writer” is void of plot beyond Francie’s (and the inferred reader’s) desire to become a writer, so it is implied that Francie—as the older seasoned narrator—now understands that intricate bombastic plots are unnecessary.