How to Become a Writer

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2015

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Blank Faces

When Francie discusses the writing process with others or shows them her work, she describes their faces as “blank,” because they do not understand her or her art. “Blank” also immediately conjures an empty page, although deliberately Moore defers making this association overt. The similes used vary through the piece to create a rolling pattern. They indicate how Francie is feeling in these moments and describe her perspective of the people around her, mostly that they are faceless or irrelevant. In the opening passage, her mother’s face is “blank as a donut” (1) and her classmates’ faces become one, “giant and blank as a vandalized clock” (6). Her mother, distracted by domestic concerns, becomes something related to food. Francie feels exposed by her classmates, even “vandalized,” and they, too, are disturbed at the idea that someone might not want to be in a creative writing class; the “clock” is a symbol of wasted time. Later, after she describes a literary joke to her roommate, she sees her face as “blank as a Kleenex” (17), an image expressive of waste.

Finally, in the second to last paragraph, now that Francie’s life is wholly consumed by writing, her date asks about the frustrations of writing, his face as “blank as a sheet of paper” (41). In this final use of “blank”, the simile arrives at the image which was suggested by blankness in the earlier occurrences: the empty page waiting to be written on. The imagery is now located in her growing identity as a writer and shows that she wishes she were writing, not on the date with the “blank” man.

Writer’s Workshop

“How to Become a Writer” creates a caricature of the typical MFA creative writing student and class, with passages set in this context and with workshop-style questions interspersed throughout the text as Francie shares her stories with her writing group. Moore’s piece forms part of a tradition which satirizes elements of the established writer's workshop process as used in MFA programs across the country. Published in 1985, it has been influential on modern authors’—and especially female authors’—self-conscious consideration of the available routes to “becoming” a writer, including the communities, methods, and personal anxieties involved. Key recent exponents of this satire include Mona Awad (Bunny, 2019), Belle Boggs (The Gulf, 2019), and Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep, 2005).

Francie is presented as falling inside the trope of the new writer who is bad with plot. In response to her apparently ludicrous plots, the students ask seemingly obvious questions of the story that are presented as typical in these classes, like, “But does it work?” (11) and “Where is the story here?” (18). At other times, they rely on intellectual theories to describe concepts as simple as humor, instead calling it “self-contempt giving rise to comic form” (9) Her class and teacher diminish her writings and, by extension, the value of her experiences, which she draws on. As Francie does not listen to their advice, they ask the same questions of every one of her stories, like a faceless “blank” Greek chorus. Moore thus sets up a tension between the external expectations, criticisms, and structures of the class and her inner voice, self-confidence, and the solitary nature of actually writing, which are the heart of the story. As Francie does not alter her style to please her critics, either she or they must be wrong. As the story is written with the authority of a professional writer and presents Francie as succeeding in the future, the satirized workshop seems to function as an exploration of what a writer is and whether this can be learned in a class. The fact that the short story itself has little or no plot at all defies the workshop’s insistence that plot is necessary for writing to be successful.

Wordplay

The story plays on the fact that the narrator is—by definition—a writer, using wordplay to call attention to the language and illustrating the joy writers find. Moore repeats a “blank” faces simile throughout her piece, associating the blankness of the minor characters—their lack of understanding, appreciation, and relevance— to the blankness of the aspiring writer’s page.

Along with her “bad plots”, Francie also enjoys titles that play with language and allude to other literary texts or well-known idioms, such as “Mopey Dick,” about a depressed man named Richard, or “For Better or Liverwurst” (21), the story she writes in response to her parents’ divorce about a couple who mistakenly blows themselves up. Here, Moore is deliberately satirizing the unsophisticated style of humor that a young writer might have. These puns are also expressive of the story’s message which is that to write about life, a writer has to experience life. Francie doesn’t have much life experience to draw on yet, so the inspiration for her stories are bad puns made on titles she has read. This wordplay suggests that that she is well-read and also that her drive to write is innate—she is only waiting for life to provide material.

The story shows a progression in the sophistication of wordplay, mirroring Francie’s progress as she becomes a more practiced writer. In the prologue section, the narrator jokingly compares “thwarted desire” to “a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against a sparrow wing leaving for mountain” (1), an affectionate joke about the experimental—and often bad and self-pitying—compositions of adolescent writers. In this instance, Moore is having fun with the idea of metaphor, creating bad ones, while pointing them out directly to readers. Once Francie has quit her job and does nothing but write, her sense of fun is still evident but she has combined this with sophistication and her wordplay becomes less cliched. Her folder of writing fragments towards the end includes “Suppose you threw a love affair and nobody came” (39). This is expressive of humor, originality, and sophistication, and also of the increasing disillusionment of Francie as a young adult.