Flip back through the book and consider what interests you about this piece of writing-what seemed strange, new, or important? 2. It’s even a good idea to spend some time just thinking about the text. Being able to have the whole book, short story, poem, or play in your head-at least in a general way-when you begin thinking through ideas will be a great help and will actually allow you to write the paper more quickly in the long run. A good paper inevitably begins with the writer having a solid understanding of the work that she interprets. There’s no substitute for a good general knowledge of your text. Writing tends to be a highly individual task, so adapt these suggestions to fit your own habits and inclinations. The following steps are intended as a guide through the difficult process of writing an interpretive paper that meets these criteria.
How do such texts mean something? If an author wanted to convey a meaning, wouldn’t she be much better off writing an essay just telling us what she meant? First, literary analyses (or papers that offer an interpretation of literary texts) rely on the assumption that stories, poems, and plays must mean something. Writing an analysis of a piece of literature can be a mystifying process. For additional information on writing about drama and poetry specifically, please see the Writing Center’s handouts on writing about drama and on writing poetry explications. This handout describes some steps for planning and writing papers about literary texts.