"The more mercy you can summon, the deeper you will travel into the truth."
That line may not sound like it comes from a book about writing, but it originates in Steve Almond's "Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow," which reaches stores next month. It has swell advice on how to structure stories, why sex scenes are crucial and what constitutes a good first paragraph. But it's about reading as much as writing — and it's hilarious, heartfelt and hopeful.
Almond teaches writing, including three online classes March 16-April 13 for Minneapolis' Loft Literary Center. He's also the author of "Candyfreak," about his obsession with sweets (if he were a candy bar, he says he'd be a milk-chocolate-crispy-rice-and-caramel Caravelle), as well as novel "All the Secrets of the World."
In advance of the Loft classes, which deal with writing humor and creating an "irresistible narrator," we chatted about books, his superpower and being a [expletive]:
Q: The subtitle of your book, "A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories," makes it sound like it's for people who plan to write books, but it taught me a lot about reading. Does the title limit the book?
A: Oh yeah. And I'm really glad you are saying that. Maybe you're just being polite, like people from Minnesota are so kind, but that's why I came up with that little bit of a clunky subtitle. My broader feeling — and I try to do some of this work in the introduction, as well — is to say, "Hey, people. We are a storytelling species. It is the central unit of consciousness for our species."
Q: So, it's for anyone who likes stories?
A: I'm interested in where, literally, stories come from. You're gonna tell stories because you can't get rid of them by any other means. I hope this doesn't sound too woo-woo, but I'm not just trying to write a craft book. I'm interested in how human beings function.
Q: Is that also manifested in "Dear Sugars," the advice podcast you hosted with "Wild" author Cheryl Strayed for four years?
A: Technically, it's about giving advice, but it's really about the stories people tell about their own lives.
Q: As a reader, peering into the minds and hearts of people who are not like me is one of my favorite things. Can you talk about that from a writer's perspective?
A: The dividend of writing and creating is you get to step outside of your own petty, radically subjective experience and say, "Hold on, I am one storyteller, but I am surround by people who have their own stories."
Q: When you're teaching a class, what's the most important thing to establish?
A: We have to make everybody feel like they're in a safe space, where we can be that radically empathic.
Q: Which, you discuss in "Truth," is not always the easiest thing to do. You're pretty hard on yourself when you describe times you fell short on that.
A: There's a whole chapter about how fragile a workshop is. You're really laying it on the line and the thing I realized after teaching writing for a long time is that people come to the class with maybe something they've been writing on for years and they bring in the manuscript: They're telling the truth about their lives, whether it's fictional or not, in a way that is probably more honest than they can be with 95 percent of the people in their lives.
Q: But what if it's a day when you're in a lousy mood?
A: My experience is that when I'm teaching, the best version of me emerges. Because people are doing such a beautiful, vulnerable thing, the least I can [expletive] do is tune into that and try to get everyone in class to tune into it. In a way, it's much easier for me to be empathic in a classroom setting. It's in other aspects of my life — dealing with my wife or my kids or a frustrating colleague — that the [expletive] parts of me take over. You can ask my family to confirm that.
Q: That empathy extends, in the book, to someone you're not a fan of, Donald Trump, whom you describe as "an unloved boy who had grown into a sad, cruel man." What about him as a storyteller of his life?
A: He's kind of the ultimate example of an unreliable narrator, where on every level he is trying to tell a story about being powerful and being the best and perfect, but underneath that is this wreck of a person who has failed over and over again and is doing everything he can because he despises himself so much. His superpower is that shamelessness.
Q: What is your superpower?
A: I'll get [students] thinking about texts and give them a prompt, like in the book, to get them writing as loose and free as they can. My superpower is through many years of listening carefully, I'm able to very quickly identify the places where they're making good powerful, true, decisions.
Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow
By: Steve Almond.
Publisher: Zando, 234 pages, $18.
