To write well, says Steve Almond, “You have to want to tell the truth.”
Steve Almond is the author of twelve books. His most recent work is a craft book for writers, “Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories” .“We are always telling two stories about ourselves: the one about who we want to believe we are and the one about who we know ourselves to be,” writesin his new book “Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories” that comes out from Zando on April 9.
More on that below, in our conversation that has only barely been edited for clarity. He joins Bookish, the Southern California News Group’s virtual program, as a guest along with novelist Rene Denfeld on Friday, April 19 at 5 pm.SA: A little context would probably help here. Ahem. When you and I were in our early 20s, we worked as rock critics at competing newspapers, you at the Las Cruces Sun-News, and me at the El Paso Times.
SA: I will tell you a secret: I don’t read craft books. Not because I’m some hotshot who doesn’t need them, but because I find them largely futile. Because no matter how eloquently they set out the mechanics of storytelling, they can’t solve the basic crisis of writing, which is that – spoiler alert! – writing is a lonely and doubt-choked pursuit. You sit there trying to make decisions, while simultaneously second-guessing, revising, mistrusting your decisions.
SA: I mean that it’s hard to be a human being, because we have these big brains that make us aware of how fragile our lives are, and how much we stand to lose, and that also constantly make us feel guilty for our impulses. We’re just, like, worried and ashamed and angry and sad all the time. And the way we deal with this, without actually killing ourselves, is to make jokes. It’s like this mechanism that allows us to get over ourselves and all our bloated existential woe.
Q. What I love about this book so much is that at its heart, it’s really about being a more conscious human. Sorry, didn’t mean to give away the ending! Also, not a question. Gosh I guess I’m really bad at this.
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