Truth Is the Arrow: Steve Almond on Comedy, Tragedy, and Forgiveness

In his newly-released craft book, Truth Is The Arrow, Mercy Is The Bow, subtitled “A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories,” Steve Almond offers essential lessons on the basic building blocks of storytelling such as plot, character, and tone, alongside less technical essentials like mystery, intuition, bravery, and authenticity. He offers this advice with his signature clarity, and often wit, alongside specific examples from books and writers he has learned from along the way.

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore recently interviewed Almond about his latest book and that “magical, elusive state” all writers hope to achieve.
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DINTY: My initial reaction when reading Truth Is The Arrow was to think, “Oh my, I wish someone had offered me clear and valuable advice like this when I was a very new writer.” The effectiveness of direct characterization, for instance, and avoiding the passive protagonist. But my second response was, “I probably wouldn’t have listened.”  Would you have taken the advice you offer in this book when you were a beginning writer, or do we all, inevitably, have to struggle through the same mistakes?

STEVE: There is no way I would have taken my own advice as a beginning writer. I would have told myself to toss off. And I still struggle to take my own advice, after 30 years of stepping on narrative rakes. That’s just the nature of the endeavor. This is why I wrote the book, as much as I could, from the perspective of a writer surveying his own failures, rather than a know-it-all professor. You have to fail enough to accept your fundamental idiocy. This humility, combined with persistence, allows you to get better. 

DINTY: I certainly learn more from my mistakes on the page than my successes. When I write myself into a corner, when I’m forced to abandon a project because it just isn’t going to work, I remember what I did wrong, because it stings so badly. Back to your good advice, though. I love that you remind memoirists to perceive younger versions of themselves “as a separate entity.” This is an area where so many memoirists struggle. How do I make myself into a character? It just feels so odd. But it is not “you” who is the character, even if you are writing events just months old. It is “you” back then. Knowing this allows for distance, for discovery, and as you put it, “unflinching self appraisal.” Is that what you mean by “truth is the arrow?” The need to be unflinching, even if the truth hurts?

STEVE: Absolutely. But you only travel into truth as far as your mercy will allow. That’s why “mercy is the bow.” The two are inextricably linked! Because you have to be to forgive that idiot, Dinty, who painted himself into a corner and had to abandon a project that had once flushed his heart with the joy of possibility. Or, in the case of your students, that younger version of themselves that screwed up in various ways and who is now, as an older, slightly wiser person, trying to reckon with all that. The mercy must extend, by the way, to all the people who contributed to your pain and confusion, or even authored it. You can only tell the whole truth, especially as a memoirist, if your final goal is understand and forgive. Because your readers deserve more than just your defensive emotions. Your job is to strip those away—to get at the grief beneath your grievance, the thwarted desire beneath your alienation, the sorrow beneath your rage.

DINTY: So beautiful, and so true: “the grief beneath your grievance, the thwarted desire beneath your alienation, the sorrow beneath your rage.“ Yet this book on the craft of writing is also quite funny in places, which any Steve Almond fan might expect, and you have an entire chapter devoted to the comic impulse.  So how do these connect, the “grief” and “sorrow” and, for lack of a better term, the funny bone?

STEVE: Ok, just think about Dinty W. Moore, the Adolescent. Think about how miserable and self-conscious Dinty was, and how much he hated his family. Think about how he survived those years? If Dinty was anything like me, he survived by making jokes, by converting negative feelings (shame, dread, disappointment, heartbreak, rage) into shit talk. We develop a sense of humor as a means of making less the grief. Comedy isn’t the opposite of tragedy. It’s the answer to tragedy. You can see this in any great standup comic (Richard Pryor, Amy Schumer, etc.). Their routines are really just public confessions of their darkest fears and feelings. The audience laughs because they recognize—with relief—that they’re not alone in their crazy.

It’s not some coincidence that the two best American novels to emerge from the atrocity of World War II are comedies (Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five). If you take a giant step backwards, humans are uniquely burdened species. We have a conscience that keeps us from acting on our worst impulses, even makes us feel ashamed of them. We also know we’re going to die, and that we may lose those around us. The comic impulse is what allows us to step back and laugh at the absurd notion that we can control any of it. It should arise unconsciously in our work, as a way of confronting dark truths, not charming the reader. In other words, it’s a bio-evolutionary adaptation, not a literary tool.

DINTY: I’m having some trouble coming up with a final question, which is, I suppose, just another instance of writer’s block.  Any advice?

STEVE: Set the bar as low as possible. That’s what I tell myself, and my students, as often as necessary. Every bad decision I’ve made at the keyboard arises from the same source: insecurity. I feel, in some primal, unshakable manner that I’m not telling the story (or, in your case, asking the question) well enough. So I start performing: flogging the language, leaping into scenes without context, reaching for cleverness. My attention drifts away from the story I came to tell—the one about my doubts and confusions, my hopes and vulnerabilities—and toward a kind of ego need. (How am I doing, reader? Am I smart/sensitive/talented enough to make you love me? Or at least hear me out?) This loss of faith—which, when it becomes debilitating, we call “Writer’s Block”—is, in fact, a natural part of the process. You can’t make it go away via willpower. It’s just the opposite: you have to find ways to be kinder to yourself—more humble before the enormity of the task, more curious and patient.

We do better, as writers, when we stop punishing ourselves for getting blocked and instead focus on the merits of getting stuck. For me, it’s been a gift more than a curse. Because I stop asking what story I should be writing and I start to ask a much more useful question: What story do I want to tell? The dream isn’t to write a bestseller, or to win the National Book Award. The dream (for me, and for you too, Mr. Dinty) is to reach that magical, elusive state where you become more interested in the story you’re telling than how you’re telling it.

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Steve Almond  is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His novel, All the Secrets of the World, is being adapted for television by 20^th Century Fox. His essays have been published in venues ranging from the New York Times Magazine to Poets & Writers, and his short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Mysteries, and Best American Erotica. He cohosted the Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed for four years, and teaches Creative Writing at the Neiman Fellowship at Harvard and Wesleyan. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his family and his anxiety.