When you write about literature, you understand it better. Moreover, you understand yourself better. Writing about a story, novel, memoir, poem, or play is a two-way act of discovery. By formulating and recording, in writing, your thoughts and feelings about the work, you discover what those thoughts and feelings really are. You not only say something but learn something about the work, and also about yourself, by making the effort to communicate what you see in it that’s especially interesting, puzzling, disturbing, insightful, illuminating, important, lacking, revealing, meaningful—in short, anything about it that strikes you, as a unique individual and reader, as worth noting and talking about.

A tried and true genre for doing this kind of writing is the literary analysis essay. In such an essay, you analyze a literary work (break it down into its basic elements of plot, character, style, symbolism, theme, and so on) and focus on one or more of these to understand how it works and what it contributes to the work’s overall effect and meaning. There are several steps to writing such an essay, each of which can be broken down into substeps. The first is to develop your argument about the work—that is, the specific interpretive point that you want to make. This, in turn, begins with reading the work carefully and selecting a topic to write about.

Read Carefully

You may have already read the work once. If so, you’ll need to return to it and review the text again in preparation for writing your essay. The following advice will help you make the most of this. (It also works well if you’re reading the work for the first time.)

• Skim the work. Pass quickly through it and notice how it’s organized and put together, the length of its different sections, recurring words and phrases, and other general information. Can you find a statement or passage that seems to capture the text’s central message or theme?
• (Re)read the work slowly and carefully to absorb its subtleties and complexities.

• Dissect a passage or phrase by analyzing literary elements that stick out. For instance, is the tone, diction, syntax, style, imagery, figurative language, theme(s), cultural/historical/religious references, rhyme, rhythm and meter, etc. significant in the passage or stanza? Take notes on whatever seems significant by writing in the margins of your text or keeping a reading journal.

• After taking notes, the second task in close reading is looking for patterns or interruptions of patterns. Gather the evidence collected and think about how each one works together to create the work as a whole or how these elements contribute to or complicate larger issues such as theme, setting, characterization. Be alert for any mention of other artworks in the text, such as a poem quoted in a story, a painting described in a poem, or a moment where a novel’s protagonist reads another novel. These inclusions (known as “intertextual allusions”) are often extremely revealing.

• Finally, think about the purpose and the effect of these significant elements/patterns in the work as a whole. This means asking why and how: Why is an author using a particular metaphor, tone, diction, etc. and how does it affect one’s understanding of the passage? How are they all related to one another? How do they help us understand the larger work?

• Engage actively with the text. Annotate as you go—that is, write on the page. Or if you can’t do that, use sticky notes or electronic notes. Look up unfamiliar terms and jot down the definitions. Highlight or underline key ideas. Write down questions and ideas that come to you. Note patterns in the text that might be considered later to help unravel its meaning. (For more about these patterns, see the section below on selecting a topic.)
  • Note that this is the stage at which you can initially apply one of the interpretive lenses associated with a particular type of literary criticism (psychological criticism, reader-response criticism, feminist criticism, etc.). Using such a lens will automatically call out certain aspects of the text for your attention and consideration.
• Gather outside information about the piece’s context, if this is helpful, but be careful not to let any historical or biographical interpretation of a literary work overly determine its meaning for you. Such things must still be supported by the text itself and integrated into your own thinking (instead of doing your thinking for you).
• React. Record your personal response to what you read, whether delight or appreciation or disagreement or anything else.

Select a Topic

Having plowed and prepared the field of your mind through careful reading, you’re ready to select a topic. Your annotations and notes will provide a helpful map of your interests and angles of engagement with the literary work. Notice that selecting a topic and reading the work as described above can be complementary; sometimes you might want to select your topic first, before (re)reading and annotating, because you already know what interests you, and thus you can focus your notes and annotations on that. (As described above, using a literary critical lens achieves the same effect.)

Form a perspective on your topic

After reading a work carefully, annotating it, and reacting to it, the next step is to determine how it fits into your perspective on the world. Forming your own conclusions about a literary work is the first step to shaping an argument and, ultimately, making a case for your perspective through a literary analysis essay. Instructions for effective writing usually emphasize clarity of purpose, sound logic, convincing evidence, effective structure, and impressive style. These are all certainly crucial elements, but it’s difficult to compose a truly persuasive and moving argument if you, yourself, don’t care about the subject.

So, what if you’re given an assignment that you are not initially interested in? For example, you may be required to write about a poem, but you don’t feel that poetry is your “thing.” Or maybe you feel awkward or disinterested when required to write about a novel or short story. Whatever your emotional and psychological “set point,” you’ll be best served—and so will your paper and its reader (including your instructor) if you find an angle on the topic that connects with what you care about. Thus, it’s important, when forming your perspective on a work of literature, not to ignore your own passions and values.

Also be sure that your perspective is supported by the evidence—that is, by the actual text of the literary work. If not, consider how your position needs to be adjusted in light of the evidence. Never “read into” a work of literature your own assumptions, biases, or desires about what it says or ought to say. Instead, stay with what it actually says (bearing in mind that there will be different levels of meaning, some of them subtler than others), and form your perspective based on that. For more about identifying and using evidence from a literary work, see the next section on planning an essay.

Also remember that, if you need help forming your perspective, some of the different schools of literary criticism provide, in a way, “ready-made” ones. Applying a literary critical school of thought won’t tell you exactly what you think or how you perceive a text—only you can determine that—but it can certainly help you focus on specific aspects of a text that you, because of your personal passions and values, might find especially interesting or noteworthy.

Analyze, don’t review.

In developing your argument, remember that your job is to analyze the literary work in order to interpret it. This requires you to read the work closely and then look at the way the elements of the text interact. How does point-of-view affect the way the characters are described? How does the setting of the work relate to its tone? How does the style of language used by the author affect the readers’ experience of the plot? What kind of imagery does the author use to establish the overall themes of the work?

Importantly, bear in mind that your job is not to be a reviewer who sings the work’s praises (or who disparages it ruthlessly) but to be an interpreter who says something meaningful about it. Again, focus on analyzing the work instead of celebrating or, in the negative sense (not the interpretive sense), criticizes it. Put differently, you are evaluating the text to elicit and comment on the opinions, viewpoints, and meanings that it expresses as a literary work, as opposed to evaluating it by offering your personal opinions on its literary merits, philosophical viewpoints, or moral perspectives.

Focus on theme.

Keep the work’s theme at the center of your thinking and planning. Although theme is only one of several elements that make up any given work of literature, it is, essentially, the heart of the thing. To oversimplify the matter massively, you can think of a work’s theme as being what it is “really about,” its underlying concern, idea, focus, or even, in rare cases, “message.” Thus, no matter what specific element or elements you choose to focus on in your essay, theme will necessarily be involved or implicated on some level. Always keeping this in mind will help to ensure that your thinking and writing remains focused on matters of central importance to a valid and valuable understanding and/or appreciation of the work—even if, as sometimes happens, your reflections uncover new themes or open new avenues of understanding on previously recognized ones.

Develop an interpretive analytical thesis.

Importantly, your thesis must make an argument, not an observation. An “observation” suggests something that is generally true about the text, like an objective element of the plot or an image used by the author. For example, if you’re writing about the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, we might make an observation about the way animal imagery seems to function for the Geat warriors. We might observe that while the Geats feature an image of a boar on their battle helmets (thus seemingly identifying with this ferocious animal), there are other moments in the text when the Geats shun vicious monsters (when they are reluctant to fight the dragon, for example.) Someone who has read the work carefully probably wouldn’t disagree with this observation, as it refers to an image used by the narrator and a specific plot point. So you couldn’t use this for your thesis. After all, what is there to argue with? You’ve simply noted a fact about Beowulf.

However, this observation could potentially lead to a valid, argumentative thesis. It poses a question or “problem” for the careful reader: What do we as readers make of this apparent contradiction in Beowulf? Why is this juxtaposition important for the narrative more broadly? What are the consequences of this juxtaposition on plot, theme, or character? In short, so what?

An “argument” is your solution to this problem. The thesis answers the “so what” question by explaining the significance of the observation and explaining why an invested reader should care about this detail. For example, one might argue that the juxtaposition of the Geats’ ferocious helmets and their subsequent unwillingness to approach the dragon suggests an inherent difference between the warriors’ appearance (outward show) and their actions. This seems to be a theme in the work. A thesis statement developed from this might read: “The difference between the Geats ferocious appearance and their later unwillingness to fight fearful monsters like the dragon suggests a devastating discrepancy between their appearance and their actions—a discrepancy that is responsible for the deterioration of the warrior culture in the epic.”

It is important to keep in mind that your thesis statement should argue something with which a reader can disagree. If you argued the thesis above, the body of your essay would not only need to prove that there is, in fact, a contradiction between the Geats’ appearance and action, but would also necessarily provide additional textual examples of how this discrepancy contributes to the deterioration of the warrior kingdoms in the epic.

With your thesis established—although you may find that it undergoes some retroactive changes as you plan and write your essay; what you’ve now got is your working or provisional thesis—you’re ready to plan the structure of your essay, the last step before writing the first draft.