The central purpose of One Writer’s Beginnings is Welty’s exploration of what it is that makes a writer become a writer and what it is that sets a writer apart from others. Welty tries to answer these questions in two basic ways: by describing the actual events and details of her life that she transforms into the stuff of story and by meditating on the meaning of these sources of her fiction-making. The central key to the secret of the writer, Welty seems to suggest, is his or her ability to determine the difference between mere events and “significant” events. A relation of mere events may be simply a chronological retelling, while significant events follow what Welty calls a “thread of revelation.” That phrase perhaps is the best description of the structure of One Writer’s Beginnings, for the book develops a continuous related thread of individual moments of revelation and meaning.

Some of the important points along this thread involve Welty’s gradual awareness of what she calls “the voice of story.” She recalls hearing her mother read stories to her, but it is not her mother’s voice she hears; she says that when she writes she hears her own words in the same voice that she hears when she reads. Welty also recalls when neighbors were invited to go on a Sunday drive in the family car and she would sit in the backseat between her mother and a friend and say, “Now talk.” It was in this way that she learned the wonderful language that she re-creates in such stories as “The Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.”

The section of the book entitled “Learning to See” is more unified in time than the anecdotal first section, for it deals with Welty’s annual summer visits to relatives in West Virginia and Ohio. Although she never lived in these areas, she feels a strong sense of place in them, particularly the mountains of West Virginia where her mother was born and reared. She takes obvious delight in telling stories of her mother’s family, for such family stories are usually a child’s first introduction to the roots of story—those revelatory moments of reality worth remembering. If life is a series of revelations, as Welty claims, then each trip that she made to her parents’ roots constituted a particular revelation for her.

In the last section, “Finding a Voice,” Welty talks about the specific sources of some of her most memorable stories, usually some image, character, or phrase from which the story grows. For example, the story “Livie,” a mythical piece about youth and old age, springs from her seeing trees throughout the South beautified with brightly colored bottles on the limbs. Her first story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” originated with a phrase she heard from a traveling man—“He’s gone to borry some fire”—that took on mythological meaning for her.

Although many experiences are too indefinite to be recognized alone, Welty says, in a story they come together and become identifiable when they take on a larger shape. Writing develops a sense of where to look for these connections, how to follow the threads, for nothing is ever lost to memory. Memory is a living thing, urges Welty, and all that is remembered joins and unites the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.