Irony In Lorrie Moore's How To Become A Writer

When people are asked when they decided to choose their career, the typical answer is that they have known they wanted to be in that career field since they were little kids. In Lorrie Moore’s short story, How to Become a Writer, she is able to bring . By using irony and having a humorous, yet mocking tone, Moore is able to tell the readers that the journey to becoming a writer is not easy and does not come naturally.
In the beginning of the story, the readers are able to pick up Moore’s humorous and slightly mocking tone which helps the story become relatable because almost everyone has had a person make fun of their career choice. When Moore says, “First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary.

A notable point of irony is when Francie is accidently placed in a creative writing class instead of her chosen class, Birdwatching 101. Normally, when an error such as that occurs, a person would want it fixed as soon as possible, but not for Francie, as Moore writes “The lines at the registrar this week are huge. Perhaps you should stick with this mistake. Perhaps your creative writing is not all that bad. Perhaps it is fate” (463). This starts off the beginning of Francie’s writing career and ironically, even though she tried to eschew from writing while attending college, she still ends up becoming one. Even though Moore wrote this story’s plot in a non-traditional way, she was still able to make it a great story, but when Francie tries to do the same thing, she is ironically lambasted for trying a difficult approach and is told by her English professor “Much of your writing is smooth and energetic. You have, however, a ludacris notion of plot” (463). As the story progresses, readers are able to see another ironic point in which Francie thinks she is an unsuccessful writer when Moore writes, “Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half believe anything and everything that is said of them” (466), but from an outside perspective, she is seen an accomplished writer, “Sooner or later you have a finished manuscript more or less. People look at in a vaguely troubled sort of way and say, ‘I’ll bet becoming a writer was always a fantasy of yours, wasn’t it?’