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Traveling in Difficult Truths Toward Elusive Mercy: An Interview with Steve Almond

Steve Almond is the author of a dozen-odd books of fiction and nonfiction, and yet, he writes: “I’ve consistently defined myself as a failed novelist.” His paradoxical admission, at once smirkingly absurd and blanchingly astute, homes in on the challenge underlying any lifetime commitment to creation. There is the work, but there is also the person who makes the work.

His new book Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories is a book on the craft of writing, but beyond that, it’s an excavation of the deeply human urge to tell stories. In this interview, we discuss storytelling as a way of making sense of our experiences, decision-making and failure on the page, and the role of literature in a rapidly changing world.

 

I think of your book as a holistic guide to writing, in the sense that you start with craft, then you travel through the foundational meanings of reading and writing, and then into the existential struggles with being a writer. How do you see the lifetime or the story of being a creator?

I like that word, holistic. I hadn’t thought about it that way. How I see it is that I’ve tried to start out with craft because, as a teacher, I really find myself saying the same things over and over again, so I wanted to set them down once and for all. But then, craft doesn’t get you to the keyboard when you’re feeling down or the evil voices get ahold of you. So, I knew that there had to be some portion that was about the inhibiting, doubting, shaming, ego-driven stuff that gets in people’s way. Then there’s a section about where stories come from and inspiration.

I’m reluctant to try to pin down the story of storytelling because of two things: One, I have my own fairly privileged journey, which was much easier than most people’s, because my parents understood and supported me. They gave me a lot of room, reassurance, and resources that a lot of writers don’t get. Some writers have to figure it out more on their own and they have to break certain silences that are much tougher to break. So, I’ve had a fairly easy flight path and I think other writers are up against a lot more.

Two, I think, in the broadest sense, the book is about paying attention and trying to create out of that. That’s something that almost everybody is doing. If somebody’s an incarcerated person, for them to get through the day with joy and meaning and safety requires a lot of creativity. Same for somebody who’s unhoused or who’s struggling with a mental health problem, family dynamic, or is just feeling at sea—they’re doing a lot of storytelling work.

So, I’m sort of reluctant to draw a line between how story functions in everybody’s lives and how it does for the people who decide to write as a central part of what they do, the ones who feel compelled to share their work and try to reach other people. That line doesn’t feel arbitrary or anything – you have to set your mind to it and be stubborn and you have to figure out a way to turn down all the dials on the evil voices so you can concentrate and make a whole bunch of decisions – but everybody’s constantly trying to tell stories to survive their lives or understand their lives. Painters go through the same thing, and accountants go through the same thing, as well as every fucking parent on earth and every partner of a long-term relationship. We’re all constantly having to do this storytelling work.

 

Do you mean to say that the storytelling that a person does about their own life and the storytelling that a writer does in, say, literary fiction, is fundamentally the same?

No, what I’m saying is that the impulse is the same. Human beings have these big brains and the way that they live with the burden of recognizing their own mortality, their vulnerability, and their guilt, and to not just act on instinct, is that they developed a bunch of ways to contend with that. A sense of humor, say, which I think is a kind of self-forgiveness in the face of the absurdity and lack of control we have over the universe. And telling stories. That basic survival mechanism of trying to understand and examine the story of your life is happening across experience.

I know that’s big and broad, but that’s the kind of craft book I wanted to write. One that said: We’re all doing this—constantly. This applies to writers, but also other people who are creative, and maybe just everybody, since everybody’s creative. And yes, there are practical things to be talked about when somebody decides to try to Write-with-a-capital-W and to get Published-with-a-capital-P. I just feel like the storytelling part of the work comes with the human arrangement. We’re all sort of stuck in the situations in our lives, and we’re all trying to step back and understand what the larger story is.

I’m not trying to minimize what writers do, but I am trying to take some of the air out of it all.

 

The field of writing is similar to photography in that sense: we talk about the problem of calling yourself a “photographer” when “everyone’s a photographer.” But there is a difference when someone is tending to craft and putting in the work, right?

You’re right. The distinction is when people who consciously say, “I’m going to put my attention to this form of creative expression,” whether it’s storytelling, photographic images, filmmaking or playwriting—whatever it is. There’s a certain amount of time and effort that people have to consciously make because otherwise capitalism and life will pull you away from it. That is a struggle that people have to engage with.

Part of the reason I’m trying to broaden it out is because I see people get very hung up on the word “writer”. When am I a “writer”? When can I call myself a “writer”? Well, when you’re sitting at the keyboard making word decisions, you’re a writer. And when your mind is at work turning over those decisions, even unconsciously, well, then you’re a writer, too. And maybe when you go to sleep, you have a dream, and something comes to you or something unlocks. You’re creating then, too.

I think asking that question, “When can I call myself a writer?”, gives its own kind of answer because it means you’re getting in your own way. The anxiety about reaching some threshold where you’re suddenly considered a “writer” feels antithetical to the really basic answer, which is that you’re doing the work of consciously sitting down and making space to focus.

I was teaching one time at the Maine Media Workshops, a week-long thing, and there was a photographer there talking about his process. He goes out and looks at the ocean and waits until after the big, spectacular moment of the sunset on the waves – he pays that extra special attention and sits just a while longer – until this unexpected thing happens with the color of the sea as the light dies out. I mean, holy shit! That’s sustained attention in the midst of distraction. That’s what makes art possible and makes creation possible. The same is true if you’re a scientist, a lawyer, or a doctor. We’re all able to, in moments of peak creativity and productivity, arrest our attention in the midst of distraction. That’s crucial.

 

Given that we live in a world that has capitalized on and monetized attention, how do books compete within that landscape?

Not very well, it turns out. But here’s how I look at it:

The glittering palace that is the global world – not the economy, but the world – is a complicated, beautiful, fucked up place with all these people on it. Capitalism certainly has orchestrated this huge, glittering ballroom, so we can picture it almost like a trade show. There’s all this crazy stuff happening. There’s Las Vegas and gambling, there’s social media and videos that are specifically designed to grab your attention, and there’s all the beautiful products on Amazon, which used to be a river. It’s a huge festival with all this stuff happening.

And over in the corner is this one high-top table with, like, three or four people talking very beautifully and deeply (and sometimes hilariously and sometimes very sadly) about what it means to be a human being at this time or any other time. That’s the literary world.

It’s a smaller conversation, yet it reaches very deeply for the people who it does reach. Sometimes there’s a bit of bleedover or they make a film out of a book, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with the rest of the carnival. That’s the nature of the business you’re in. It’s a smaller, deeper conversation. It’s still happening and it’s still vital to those of us that it’s vital to. I don’t know what will happen next, because this has all really accelerated over the course of my lifetime. I’m glad that books still exist. I’m glad that I get to make them. In a spiritual sense, it’s a kind of refuge for people, because I think that we’re all kind of losing the thread of what it means to be human. Literature is one way to remember that everybody else is suffering and that your imagination has to take in their suffering and their motives. If you really grant everybody mercy, you will get to the bottom of the truth.

So, it feels wonderful that that still exists, but I’m under no illusions that it’s not competing with anything. It’s been overrun. There are people who still find value and meaning and community in books and stories, but it’s the smaller group who translate the little specks of ink into movies in our head.

 

Reading and writing both occupy a strange niche of being solitary activities that we do to feel less alone. How do you think that squares with the community you’re describing?

It is a strange thing, because it’s like a bunch of lonely people trying to get less lonely. But it feels very nourishing and, in a way, it’s a way of finding intimacy.

I have this friend who’s a lawyer, and sometimes he’ll come to a literary event. I can see the wheels start turning, as he starts to think it could be really cool to tell a story. He’s got a whole bunch of stories inside and thinks maybe there’s another way of expressing them than just a funny story at a party,—something that reaches a little deeper. I don’t think he’s ever going to sit down and become a writer, but he has that impulse and he understands there’s something nourishing there.

I love teaching for that reason. I feel like I get access to the shit that people are struggling with, even if it’s in a fictional disguise. The stuff they can’t get rid of by other means. There’s something beautiful about that.

 

Your book retraces some of the various hard-learned lessons of your own decades-long career. For example, you write about a point when you realized you were writing egoless prose, and the insight of finally understanding what that meant. What are we to do with the knowledge that it takes so much time to understand egoless creation?

Well, understand that for most of us, it’s very intermittent. For instance, when I teach, sometimes I give a generative writing prompt, and this thing just comes reeling out of someone. They might never write another thing like that in their lives, but for those 20 minutes, they became way more interested in the story they’re telling than whether they were telling it well. There’s very little ego, just pure attention on trying to capture in language the experiences that suddenly are revisiting them. There’s this ravenous curiosity.

There are certain writers – say Dickens and Austen and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – who must have been in that zone of pure imagination a lot. Stephen King, even though he’s a different sort of writer, must be in that zone a lot. For most of the rest of us, and for me anyway, it’s a lot more intermittent. For the books of mine that are the visible record, I stand by most of those decisions. I was able to kind of get my ego out of it and write in the service of story. Language was really an instrument of truth, or maybe that sounds a little too heavy, but you know what I mean—I was not standing in the way performing, I was actually storytelling. That’s a fairly small percentage of the decisions that I’ve made.

So, I think of it as incremental. What you’re trying to do is maximize the time that you’re spending at the keyboard, just understanding inherently that some of the time you’re going to be in your head, you’re going to be pushing the language around, you’re not going to know the next beat of the story, or you’re going to be blocked in one way or another. And that’s okay. I mean, it sucks, and it’s not really okay, but you can’t do anything about it. You have to accept the process that gets you to the word decisions—the decisions that you can stand by, and that you feel your ego isn’t too present in them, maybe not present at all. If you harvested two or three of those in a day, that’s a good haul. If you got more than that, wow, you were cooking with gas. And if you were blocked entirely and you feel sort of guilty about it… Well, okay, nothing to show on the scoreboard, but at least you were thinking about it.

 

You describe plot as the pursuit of revelation, which is to say insights taking place in the mind, but emphasize that it’s action that determines fate. How would you describe this tension between thinking and doing?

I write in the book about Aristotle, who said it’s by a character’s actions that they’re made happy or the reverse. Through that, I address what I struggled with in my early novels – none of which are published, thankfully – which is that simply having a character think things constantly, and not act creates a certain kind of passivity. If they’re turning things over, worrying about the future, and mourning the past – there can be plenty of action in those thoughts, if you see what I mean, but I’d fallen into a pattern in many pieces of writing where the central character does not act in a way that either makes them happy or the reverse.

When I finally was able to write a successful novel, it was not a coincidence that the heroine of that novel kept acting—she kept doing things that were active, and that brought her great excitement and gratification and also got her into trouble in ways that she couldn’t see. There are some stories in which characters who are sitting around thinking a lot can be very wonderful and stimulating, like Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. But what they’re talking about is full of action and drama and tension and loss and risk and passion.

So, it does depend on what people are thinking about and talking about, but I also think that writers early in their careers (and certainly I, early in my career) get into a habit of having a narrator passively observing other people, rather than putting themselves on the chopping block and taking action in one way or another.

 

What do you think is the most important thing that you try as an educator to impart about storytelling?

People should be simple and direct about whatever it is that matters to them. Don’t hide the story. Don’t get in your head. Don’t try to perform. Just be simple and direct.

I think that is easy to say and really hard to do. The moment that people sit down at the keyboard, they’re sitting down with their ego and their doubt and their evasions and all their fancy footwork, and it’s really hard to write simply and directly about the things that matter to you the most deeply. But most of the time, that’s what the reader really wants.

 

It can be a difficult lesson to absorb readily, especially in the context of studying literature, where you may be paying so much attention to the great writers and how artfully they do something—the fancy footwork.

I know what you’re saying, because there’s a real elegance to Jane Austen’s prose. But if you look at the sentences of any great stylist, what you’re really picking up on is how precise they are about the truth and how much work the prose is doing. Most literature that really endures has to meet this basic standard: it has to be efficient and precise and truthful, period. Cormac McCarthy knows more words than God, but he uses them all really precisely. He gets deep into the situations, and even if they’re toxically masculine and violent, I believe the worlds that he creates.

I do think there’s an objective standard which is, if there are any extra words or words that are imprecise or overly familiar – you know, where somebody just selected the phrase that is almost meaningless in its abstraction – we can clearly point to that and know it’s not going to last. It’s not precise enough. It’s not true enough. Anything that we’re still talking about may not be your sensibility, but it meets those basic requirements.

So, I’m reluctant to say that’s “artful”, because that implies some conscious attempt. I just think the way that Toni Morrison tells the truth – or Cormac McCarthy or Faulkner – is more complex and associative and dense and convoluted than I can muster. Their version of simple and direct is not Almond’s version.

 

What role do you think failure plays in creation?

Failure and success go hand-in-hand. People are more likely to encounter failure than they are success, and so the question isn’t whether or not you’re going to fail, but rather: How do you react to it? Are you shut down by it? Or aggrieved about it? Does it cause you get even more in your head and self-conscious and then push the language around to try to prove that you’re smart or deep or whatever?

In my life, failure has often been very cleansing. Because oftentimes, I’m trying to write something that I’m not good at, or it’s beyond my current capacities, and I fail. Then an agent or an editor delivers the bad news, and I get angry and depressed and bummed out for a while. I beat myself up for not being good enough to write the big ambitious novel that I struggled with for so long. But then, I’m also going to get down to business and figure out what book I can write. I’ll ask what I’m actually capable of writing, that I urgently need to write. That’s different than the book I “should be” writing or the book that my ego wants me to write. So failure has kind of been clarifying for me—not that I’m recommending it. Of course I would rather succeed than fail.

I wrote this book in the spirit of saying that what you (the reader) and I have in common most powerfully is a sense of being a failure—at having failed at various ambitions. I’m writing from that position, rather than the position of, “Here’s all the stuff I know because – Look at me! – I’m such a great writer.” I’m always in some state of self-doubt, worry, anxiety, or failing in one way or another. Even though I’m trying to turn that dial down, I’m always saying, “I could have done more today,” or having doubts about the decisions I made or that it’s going to hold together. There have been very few times where I’ve really felt that I am writing egoless prose, where I’m not worrying about failing, or what the reader thinks of me. Rather than freaking out about that, or criminalizing it, or trying to drown it out with a boost of confidence, I’d rather say: Well, you’re always going to have that, so how do you manage it? How do you just live with it and try to turn the dial down, rather than trying to rip it off the console? Because it got installed long before you had control.

 

Why do you think that you continue to write, given that you say in the book how misery-inducing writing can be for you?

Well, I love the feeling of having written, and I actually think it helps me be a better person—a better version of myself. In my unmediated state, as I’m moving through my life, I feel like I mess up a lot. And it’s the writer in me that says, “It’s not the break that matters, it’s the repair,” you know? All the smart, wise, merciful things come out of the writer me, and all the fucked up, anxious, shitty stuff is sort of the rest of my life. I guess it’s the one place where I can create a version of myself that is more attentive, more thoughtful, more compassionate, and maybe on some basic level more likable than I actually wind up being in real life.

 

Coming back to what you said about those early novels of yours that ultimately got shelved, how do you feel about those works now?

I wish they were better. I wish that I could figure out how to make them better. Sometimes a thought will zip through my mind about it, like, “Why couldn’t I figure that out?” or “Maybe I should poke at it again.” But, on a good day I let that go. I tried with those stories, I just couldn’t connect them. And that’s part of the process. There’s the visible part of the iceberg, made up of all the decisions I’ve made in the stories that got put out into the world, and then the rest of the iceberg is all the decisions that got rewritten and that never got published. It’s all the trying.

It’s very comforting to think that all the writers who I think of as godlike – Kurt Vonnegut or Lorrie Moore or whoever – they’ve got plenty of shitty stuff in the drawer, too. You just never saw it. That’s the price of doing business.

 

You write about literature as a way to understand our inner lives and to “travel in difficult truths toward elusive mercy,” and also that this defies “the clamoring edicts of our age, the buy messages, the endless pleas for followers and likes.” Let’s talk about the tension or contrast between the edifying power of literature and the capitalist world in which it sits, that has writers doing the marketing for their own books or trying to build “platforms” to connect with their readers.

I understand what you’re saying, and I think writers are told they have to do those things but I don’t think people have to, really. Anytime there’s a “have to” or a “should”, I usually press on the question and ask, where’s that voice coming from? Agents want to convert a story into a commodity, or something that they can sell, so they can get a percentage. I’m not trying to condemn what agent literary agents do, I’m trying to identify it.

Having said that, there’s always this tension between the person who’s just making art, and the person who has to live in the world. That includes capitalism but also their own ego, their own desire to find an audience, their own desire to connect. That’s a tension. In an ideal world, you just want to tell your story and tell it well. Okay, let’s say you do that. Let’s say you reach that kind of nirvana. Well, then, you do want to share it. You do want to find a way for it to reach people.

My general experience is that the audience is going to be smaller than you think. And that you should be grateful for every bit of it.

I’m not selling iPhones here, you know? I’m not selling viral videos. I’m selling an extremely inconvenient form of consciousness. I’m not trying to court obscurity, but I’m lucky if a book sells in the thousands. Some authors sell lots of copies because of their extraordinary talent or good fortune, and good for them, but it’s a short list. The rest of us lunkheads have to make our peace with reaching a smaller number of people in a deeper way.

 

With that in mind, what do you wish more people understood about sustaining a creative career over a lifetime?

The answer would be different based on who I’m saying it to. To writer people, I would say, try to uncouple financial expectation from the creative part if you can. Because it’s hard enough to hear the story, without the market trying to whisper in your ear, as well.

I do get sort of bummed out when my daughter talks about how people get angry or frustrated in her English class because the author is using all these “big words” or being “too convoluted” or whatever. Then she’ll show me the poem and I can see it’s a beautiful poem. The words are all doing work.  It’s just people responding to their own difficulty engaging in some deeper thing by saying, “It’s dumb,” or, “It’s above my head.” That sort of shame-driven reaction.

So, to people who aren’t writers, I want to say that we’re actually trying to reach you. This is not some arcane, obscure thing that is above your head. If the writing is any good, it’s mostly people just using the language to speak in a very precise, truthful way. That can be disorienting, but it’s also kind of thrilling. And this is the place to go when you’re feeling lonely or confused or hurt. You can continue to go to the viral videos and the lords of marketing, and they’ll pump you full of anxiety and doubt to sell you shit. But if you want somebody to speak with you truthfully and oftentimes tenderly, you have to be patient. There is a place for that. It’s not above your head, it’s right at your eye level.

But, like, what good is saying that to someone, you know? People have to come to that on their own, and so I’m wary of delivering any kind of lecture to anybody. But I just want to say, it’s there. It’s always there. Even if people only find it once a month or once a year, it’s still there. That’s kind of comforting to know.

 


Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories is available from publisher Zando. In addition to his own writing, Steve Almond is a teacher. See his website for an up-to-date listing of his upcoming workshops.

Katherine Oktober Matthews (www.oktobernight.com) is an artist and analyst based in The Netherlands. She writes and edits extensively in the field of art, is the author of Unique: Making Photographs in the Age of Ubiquity, and founder of Riding the Dragon.

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