How To Become A Writer by Lorrie Moore, 1985
The magic trick:
Presenting a hilariously specific story as some kind of how-to guide
Lorrie Moore is here today to get your inevitably ambitious New Year’s resolution off on the right foot. So you want to become a writer?
Easy.
Moore tells you how, step by step. Yes, it’s one of those second-person stories. And it’s very, very funny. Maybe the funniest in the Lorrie Moore canon, and that’s saying something.
The second-person narration plays into the humor too. The overarching joke quickly becomes clear. What is presented as a how-to guide, relatable to just about anyone, is hilariously specific and odd. Which, come to think of it, maybe inadvertently winds up accomplishing just what the title promises.
And that’s quite a trick on Moore’s part.
The selection:
In your high school English class look only at Mr. Killian’s face. Decide faces are important. Write a villanelle about pores. Struggle. Write a sonnet. Count the syllables: nine, ten, eleven, thirteen. Decide to experiment with fiction. Here you don’t have to count syllables. 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. Give it to Mr. Killian as your final project. When you get it back, he has written on it: “Some of your images are quite nice, but you have no sense of plot.” When you are home, in the privacy of your own room, faintly scrawl in pencil beneath his black-inked comments: “Plots are for dead people, pore-face.”
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