Steve Almond, 2024
Key words
Writing, writer’s craft, creative writing, narrative writing, writing teacher, practical writing advice, personal essays, short stories, fiction writing
Craft books aren’t supposed to make you cry, are they?
Steve Almond’s DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories did — more than once.
Not the sheer-sense-of-futility tears that writing stirs from time to time, but the presence-of-wisdom thrill that juices the ducts like lemons.
Although not exclusively concerned with memoir, Truth… holds to be self-evident that writing emerges from memory and — whatever the form or genre — the writer’s attitude towards things remembered is fundamental to successful creation.
Mercy must extend, by the way, to all the people who contributed to your pain and confusion, or even authored it.
Almond said in an interview with Dinty Moore of The Brevity Blog.
How does that apply to writing, say, end-of-year sales reports? one might ask.
Two words, courtesy of George Orwell: “sheer egoism.” The twentieth century’s consummate essayist and compulsive truth-teller argued that many, perhaps most, writers write out of “desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc.”
An end-of-year-sales report is as much an ego exercise as an ode, novel or scintillating email. Maybe more so. (Professional writing carries the weight of subsistence, along with everything else we ask writing to do.) So don’t discount Truth and Mercy. It behooves a thoughtful writer to interrogate what they are doing, and why.
Ask and it may—if-you’re-lucky—be given
Interrogate is a word redolent of metal tables, one-way windows and shouting police. Most people avoid interrogations, if they can.
Writers must walk into that bare room and stare into the unforgiving glare. The emotional labor required to get “just the facts” on the page is the reason most folks choose not to pursue writing as a profession.
When Almond advises:
Set the bar as low as possible.
it’s not cutesy reverse-psychology aimed at eliciting coruscating prose. It is is maybe the only way a writer can get themselves to face a page.
“I find writing excruciating, a form of self-imposed exile with a side order of shingles. I would rather do almost anything other than write. If you are one of those people who doesn’t agree… well then, I am happy for you in the exact same way you are happy for the person who married your soulmate.”
Such pronouncements by professional authors ring slightly hollow but it’s a sign writers’ yearnings for comfort that we (okay, I) gobble them up anyway.
It’s reassuring to know that even when one has possesses the enviable accoutrements of agent/publisher/robust bibliography the fundamental act of creation is still a war fought in tiny trenches of the soul.
But — crucially — a noble conflict. And one, Almond notes, doesn’t have to come with a decisive denouement: “the stories we tell (if they are honest) should be full of doubt… a creative struggle to understand and make meaning from our destructive impulses, our disappointments and delusions, our unresolved traumas.”
Beginning-Middle-End
As befits a work on the craft of narrative, Almond’s book is divided into three parts:
Demystifying the Craft
Source Materials
Meditations
‘Demystifying’ begins the admission: “I suck at plot. More broadly, I suck at planning. I am not an organized person.”
So far, so relatable.
Still in confessional mode, Almond notes that as a journalist, he didn’t need to worry about plot: incidents were provided. Which may explain my abiding preference for journalism over ‘creative’ writing (though I’ll defend to the death the notion that well-crafted journalism is every iota as creative as the most experimental novel).
In addition to plot, Part 1 addresses characters, chronology, openings and narrators.
Part II, Source Materials, gets into the (always sticky) business of what to write about — and here Almond tweaks the jaded axiom write what you know into write what obsesses you.
This is dicey, given how inarticulate, addled and irrational we humanoids are about our obsessions.
It’s also smart: if a writer can pull it together enough to write well about their obsessions then A) the world is their print-extruding oyster and B) there’s a good chance that people who share those obsessions but lack the grit, talent and/or masochism to hammer them onto a page will pay to see it done.
Almond takes on matters often absent from how-to tomes: comedy and sex.
These are usually elided, one presumes, on the assumption that they are too personal, or too delicate, to be the subject of didaction.
Almond proves this is, or shouldn’t be, the case.
On comedy:
Comedy is produced by a determined confrontation with a set of feeling states that are tragic in nature: grief, shame, disappointment, physical discomfort, anxiety, moral outrage.
On sex:
What if we freed ourselves to write about sex as we actually experience it, which is, yes, sometimes sexy, but also: doubt-choked, distracted, guilt-ridden, angry, sorrowful.
If this is starting to sound downbeat and, why can’t I just write a nice story? take heart — nobody is holding a gun to anyone’s head. If you don’t want to sit down at the typewriter and bleed, don’t.
But for those tempted or compelled to write, there is no satisfaction in half-assing it.
The final main section, Mediations, sees Almond rummage through anecdotes from years of teaching and writing, smooth out the best, and share them in a spirit of we’ve-all-been-there camaraderie: “your essential task as a writer isn’t to avoid failure but to learn from it,” he says soothingly. “You have to be able to convert humiliation into humility.”
My take
Truth is the Arrow… is a book I’d send unsolicited copies of to my favorite people. Especially if they are writers.
The sections on conflict, aka plot, and character are among the best I’ve read. But it is Almond’s empathy and insight that made this an instantly cherished part of my craft collection.
It is easy to get caught up in sentence structure, phrasing, comma placement; easy to get caught up in dreams of publication or the reality of rejection. Easy to get disconnected from why the work matters.
Truth… is an arrow that bursts those balloons, a pointed reminder of what matters:
Writing is an attention racket. But it’s also a forgiveness racket. The best way to keep going… is to remember that your goal is to forgive everyone involved, yourself foremost.
Their take
“Almond could trot out the usual literary suspects as examples of what works. Instead, he introduces readers to some lesser-known writers through the use of brilliant snippets of writing. Yes, Joan Didion, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez make cameo appearances, and there is a Star Wars reference, but more interesting are examples from writers like Natasha Trethewey, Meg Wolitzer, and Almond’s personal favorite, John Williams…. Bringing the work of these writers to light, and splashing examples of his own work into the mix, provides a broader perspective to inform those who want to improve their craft.”
— Andrew Careaga, Medium, Jun 14, 2024
Must read for
Writers trying to figure out how to go deep without drowning.
Read also
How to Write Like a Writer — Thomas Foster
One Writer’s Beginnings — Eudora Welty
Tiny Beautiful Things — Cheryl Strayed