Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How to Become a Writer, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Creativity and Perseverance
Violence, Trauma, and Isolation
Sex vs. Love
Summary
Analysis
In her early teenage years, Francie—who narrates the story from a second-person point of view—writes her first poems after she fails to turn improbable ambitions, like being President of the World, into reality. The poems are haiku sequences which illustrate “thwarted desire” with gentle, natural images. Francie shows the poems to her mom who, she notes, has a son in Vietnam (Francie’s brother) and a husband (Francie’s father) who might be having an affair. Instead of commenting on Francie’s writing, her mom tells her to unload the dishwasher. Francie does so, accidentally breaking a cheap glass.
Even at the very beginning of her writing life, the people closest to Francie disregard her creative efforts to prioritize other tasks and goals. Francie seems to respond subconsciously to this by breaking the glass, which also shows that she finds it difficult to focus on practical tasks the way others do. In fact, the glass breaking demonstrates that the domestic world is a source of surprising violence in Francie’s life—and this scene in the kitchen is a taste of the explosive domestic scenes that will pervade Francie’s stories.
Themes
In her high school English class, after struggling to write villanelles and sonnets, Francie tries her hand at fiction. She writes a story about an elderly couple who accidentally shoot each other. Her teacher, Mr. Killian, compliments her images but criticizes her understanding of plot. When Francie gets home, she writes under his comments in pencil, “Plots are for dead people, pore-face.”
Francie’s reaction to criticism is not to accept and absorb it, but to react against it. From her reaction, it seems that the absurd accident at the heart of her first story makes sense to Francie in a way she can’t express to others. Her penciled comment, which plays on the word “plot” as a term for a cemetery plot rather than a narrative device, also hints at Francie’s tendency to resort to humor in times of stress and frustration.
Themes
Francie takes all the babysitting jobs that come her way. She’s a good babysitter: kids love her, and she sings to them and tells them stories. After the children fall asleep, she reads every sex manual in the house. She doesn’t understand how people who love each other can treat each other the way the manuals suggest. One night while babysitting, she falls asleep reading a copy of Playboy. When the parents come home, they see what she’s been reading and smile. Francie explains how she convinced their daughter to take her medicine. She applies to college with a major in child psychology.
By reading all the books about sex she can find, Francie is deliberately exposing herself to something that makes her feel uncomfortable. This seemingly illogical behavior is something that will define her writing habits in the coming years—it’s clear she finds something compelling about discomfort and confusion. Furthermore, this passage emphasizes Francie’s understanding of sex as something separate from, and perhaps in conflict with, her understanding of love.
Themes
In college, Francie signs up for an ornithology class as one of her electives. On the first day of class, she arrives to find everyone discussing metaphors. Francie realizes that she’s accidentally enrolled in a creative writing class. Put off by the long lines at the registrar, she suspects fate is at work, and she decides to stick with the class instead of switching. Francie categorizes the people she meets in college as either smarter or dumber than herself—a dichotomy she’ll keep using for the rest of her life.
This moment suggests that, while there seems to be an element of fate involved in Francie’s writing career, she doesn’t seem to try very hard to resist the pull of fate, giving up her effort to transfer classes as soon as she finds a long line. The reader can infer that writing is something that follows Francie, rather than the other way around—but, however subconsciously, Francie enjoys writing, or at least feels it’s the right thing for her to do.
Themes
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One of Francie’s creative writing assignments is to tell a violent story. She turns in two stories: one about driving with her uncle, and another about an elderly couple electrocuted by a badly wired lamp. The teacher compliments Francie’s “smooth and energetic” prose but criticizes her bizarre sense of plot. Francie’s next story features a man and woman who, after being maimed in an explosion, buy a frozen yogurt stand together with the insurance money. After Francie reads this story to her class, they criticize her “outrageous and incompetent” sense of plot.
Turning in two stories when, presumably, only one was required demonstrates Francie’s tenacity as a writer. The story about the elderly couple echoes the first story Francie wrote, setting up a pattern of violent, absurd accidents in her fiction. There’s also a pattern to Francie’s readers’ reception of her stories: her teacher and classmates here are as perplexed as Mr. Killian was by the inexplicable plot device. This moment confirms both that Francie is a competent prose stylist and that her compulsion to depict strangely violent incidents estranges her from those around her.
Themes
Francie decides she might be better suited to writing comedies. She starts dating a boy the people in her class consider to be funny and writes down all his jokes without telling him. She uses anagrams of his ex-girlfriend’s name as names for the socially inept characters in her stories. When she tells her boyfriend that his ex-girlfriend is in her stories, he doesn’t find it funny. Meanwhile, Francie’s advisor tells her she needs to focus more on courses in her major. Francie tells the advisor she understands.
Francie’s behavior in this passage highlights that she has a different understanding of humor to those around her. Though Francie’s peers find the boy she dates funny, Francie herself isn’t convinced, and tries to challenge his sense of humor. His reaction to her writing resembles her other readers’ confusion and highlights the fact that Francie’s creativity isolates her from others.
Themes
Over the next two years, the members of Francie’s class continue to wrestle with questions about fiction—questions that seem important to them. When it’s time for the class to read Francie’s story, they look up at her, drag on their cigarettes, and smile sweetly. When Francie becomes demoralized, her boyfriend suggests she should try cycling, while her roommate suggests she should get a different boyfriend. Francie’s only happy when she’s writing something new in the middle of the night. In these moments, she’s sure she’s a genius. She switches majors from child psychology to creative writing.
The description of Francie’s classmates makes them seem like a homogeneous group of people who all follow the same trends and share the same interests. By implication, Francie is not part of this group, and there’s an irreparable rift between the others and herself. This rift is only emphasized by her boyfriend’s and roommate’s advice. While they offer practical solutions to Francie’s low mood, her instinctive response is only to write more and, in effect, to further distance herself from others. The passage highlights that self-reliance, perseverance, and isolation are all integral to Francie’s growth as a writer.
Themes
Francie asks herself questions like “Why write?” and “If there’s a God, then why is my brother now a cripple?” Her new writing professor is obsessed with the imagination and encourages the class to write stories that begin in reality but then alter that reality. Francie has the idea to rewrite Moby-Dick as a story about the life insurance industry featuring a man called Richard whose wife refers to him as “Mopey Dick.” Upon hearing the idea, Francie’s roommate puts an arm around Francie’s shoulders and suggests they go out for a beer. Francie’s classmates don’t like the story and criticize its lack of plot.
Francie’s brother’s return from war isn’t something Francie addresses in conversations with others—it’s something the reader finds out through Francie’s private thoughts, which suggests Francie is finding it difficult to understand and accept her brother’s injuries. Meanwhile, her roommate’s response to her story idea continues the trend of Francie’s sense of humor alienating and confusing her friends. In fact, her roommate isn’t just confused, but troubled, which implies that what Francie finds funny is actually distressing to those around her—another sign that Francie’s experience of the world is fundamentally at odds with most other people’s.
Themes
Francie’s next writing professor encourages the class to write about their own experiences. Francie pinpoints three major events from the last three years of her life: she lost her virginity, her parents got a divorce, and her brother came back from war with permanent scars. She writes a straightforward story about losing her virginity. To address the divorce, she writes a story about an elderly couple getting blown up by a landmine in their kitchen—a story she titles, “For Better or for Liverwurst.” She fails to write anything at all about her brother.
Though all three of the listed events distress Francie, her creative responses to each one demonstrate her ability to process different traumas. Having sex for the first time feels like a momentous event for Francie, but it seems like something she can understand and express her feelings about. Humor and metaphor are the only means by which she can express the distress she feels about her parents’ divorce, which implies she can’t process it as a part of her own reality and needs to create some distance between it and herself. Meanwhile, her inability to write about her brother’s injury suggests it has fundamentally disrupted her life in a way she can’t yet process.
Themes
At parties, when people ask Francie what she writes about, her roommate drunkenly tells them that Francie always writes about her boyfriend. Francie stubbornly disagrees with her roommate and says she’s not interested in any particular subject, but more focused on the beauty of language itself. This answer confuses people and loses their attention, and Francie begins to wonder whether she actually writes about anything at all. She reads that all writing is related to the writer’s genitals—a thought she ignores, because it worries her.
Francie’s roommate’s feelings of frustration about Francie’s boyfriend manifest in her understanding of Francie’s work. The contrast between her comprehension of Francie’s stories and Francie’s authorly intentions shows that Francie may not yet possess enough skill as a writer to express what she means. Francie’s conversation emphasizes that her creative interests make little sense to those around her, even her readers—a thought that reveals her self-doubt as a writer.
Themes
Francie’s mother comes to visit her. She brings two books: one, a guide to becoming a business executive; the other, a baby names encyclopedia Francie requested because she needs to find a new name for a character. Francie’s mother reminds Francie she wanted to be a child psychology major. When Francie says she likes to write, her mother seems unconvinced.
Francie’s mother wants what’s best for her, and she shows this care in two different, conflicting ways. The business book demonstrates her desire to encourage Francie into a more practical and lucrative career, a way of caring for Francie by attempting to ensure her financial comfort, while the baby names book is a sign that Francie’s mother acknowledges, and begrudgingly respects, Francie’s creativity.
Themes
Francie writes a story featuring two violinists who accidentally blow themselves up. She’s relieved to be taking other courses like biology, where she learns that the male octopus loses one of his arms to the female during sexual intercourse. Francie is glad she knows things outside the world of writing, and she applies to law school.
The presence of other interests and pursuits, like science and law, is a relief to Francie, which emphasizes that her writing habit is forced upon her—an unfortunate fate she wants to escape, rather than a pleasurable pastime.
Themes
Francie decides not to go to law school, and eventually she returns to writing, attending night classes while taking odd jobs and losing touch with her friends. She breaks up with her boyfriend and goes out with men who prefer rough sex, something Francie perceives as being helpful for her writing. After a while, she finishes a manuscript. When people ask her whether writing has always been her fantasy, she tells them it was never even in her top 20 fantasies. When Francie says she planned to be a child psychology major, people tell her they think she’d be good with children, which makes her scowl.
Francie’s creative life seems to demand a haphazardly balanced lifestyle of classes, jobs, and writing over the relatively steady and linear option of law school—a lifestyle that seems to demand isolation, and one in which sex is more a threat than a pleasure. The reader can infer that the life of a writer isn’t a secure or even enjoyable one—perhaps, particularly for Francie, creativity demands a level of discomfort. Francie echoes this discomfort in her attitude: she’d rather be seen as cold and formidable than a warm, child-loving person.
Themes
Francie quits her classes and her jobs and withdraws money from savings to allow herself time to write. Instead, she copies addresses from one address book to another. She keeps a folder of written fragments, one of which says, “Possible plot? A woman gets on a bus.” When a date asks her whether writers get discouraged, she says they do, and compares writing to polio. Her date repetitively smooths down the hairs on his arm.
Writing is something that drains Francie, requiring sacrifices and prompting procrastination. Even after she completes a whole manuscript, Francie’s understanding of plot doesn’t seem to be any more comprehensible than in the first story she wrote. (Not many people would consider a woman getting on a bus to be a riveting storyline.) Francie confuses and alienates the people around her just as much as she did in college. The final moment of the story suggests that the journey to becoming a writer is a frustrating, circuitous route rather than a conventional linear path of growth.
Themes
