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.