Negotiating the Curse of Influence – A Review of Steve Almond’s Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

You know what I’m talking about: that part of the horror movie when the protagonist must decide to whom they will pass on the terrible curse that has been afflicting them since the end of Act I. Think: Thinner. Think: Drag Me to Hell. In horror plots, curses tormenting the pitiable hero are conventionally retaliatory, the consequence of a transgression committed out of ignorance, impatience, or some other human failing. Once the hero learns they can break the curse by passing it on to an innocent bystander, their decision becomes the story’s central, character-revealing predicament. The anxiety this moral dilemma induces is a lot like the way I feel when considering craft books to assign to my workshops.

Do I give them Anne Lamott? Betsy Lerner? David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife? Or do I pass on my own curse? When I arrived at the University of Texas, so many years ago that presidents were still playing saxophones, I had the good fortune to take Intro Workshop with Elizabeth Harris, who assigned us John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. I was immediately struck. To deploy a phrase nobody used in 1998, I felt seen. Gardner’s insights and polemical criticisms meshed perfectly with what I felt I needed to know. I then read his On Becoming a Novelist, deepening the curse that was settling upon me—or, to be less dramatic, the ideological impression this dead man was making in my brain. To this day I still analogize reading with dreaming. I catch myself expecting every story to make a moral statement about the human condition. I still (privately, facetiously) think of students who confuse unreliable storytelling with unreliable narration as akin to axe murderers and mad sea captains. I still assume egoic instincts can help a writer endure the same problems those egoic instincts create. And to this day I am in constant conflict with these anachronistic truisms, lest I become a dinosaur, or something much worse: a putative authority on an art form that is as stable and as knowable as the open ocean. The irony is that I feel Gardner’s impression upon my point of view has worked out more or less okay for me—that is, I am cursed, but in kind of a good way.

Yet I hesitate to transfer such a curse onto my students, even from the more contemporary (and less dogmatic) likes of Stephen King or George Saunders. Giving a young writer their first exegesis on craft is apt to inflect the way they perceive their writing for the next five years, or perhaps the remainder of their term. That is not an influence I wish to wield. And giving them Gardner, in 2024, feels obsolescent, more than a little boomer-y, and a smidgen sadistic. The Old Guard of creative-writing pedagogy (Gardner, Frank Conroy, Wallace Stegner, and so on) presided over the end of the Cold War, when the CIA was subsidizing creative-writing programs, partly to cultivate a national style of serious literary realism—one that could repulse the advance of Marxism-friendly literature from abroad—and partly to cow the literary riffraff at home by colonizing universities with a putatively unimpeachable (and visibly bourgeois) ideology. And yet, we have to give our students something, don’t we? They need to meet with the specter of ideology so they are not consumed or disarmed by it, credulously running around demanding “rising action,” or insisting that we must only write what we know. Like a sufficiently round character in an American gothic, I am in conflict with myself.

In the nick of time comes Steve Almond’s Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow. In a sense, this is the long-awaited Generation X entry into the canon of how-to-be-a-writer books, if your associations with Gen X are suburban enough to include a trenchcoated teenager holding a boombox over his head, playing Peter Gabriel for his estranged girlfriend. Because Almond’s book is rather like a mixtape. That is the sensibility. Yes, it has become commonplace to refer to all things combinatory as “a mixtape”—an assortment of chocolates, a flight of craft beers—but truly, Almond has produced an epistolic collage of narrative and instruction, including pithy sound-bite quotations, punctuating chapters with thoughtful writing prompts. The principles of craft, and the evidence for their efficacy, are presented in ways that are associative and recursive. (Even the compound title is cryptic, tape-like. Side A: TRUTH IS THE ARROW. Side B: MERCY IS THE BOW.) Also, Almond’s book is honest and earnest, much like a homemade cassette designed to please its audience while shifting something within them.

Whenever Almond self-deprecates, whether while chronicling his career missteps, or downplaying his successes as a winsome everyman writer, you get the sense that he is attempting to compensate for his ardor and insistence, even though very little of Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow challenges the genre. In fact, that is the most mixtape-like aspect of the book: The same way a dubbed cassette attempts to produce an original and unique expression by adducing texts that already exist, Almond’s book is primarily an intelligent recapitulation and curatorial rephrasing of a century of essential insights and common-sense wisdom, nuggets that are sometimes defamiliarized, and sometimes brought into sharper focus, by Almond’s dogged yet concise reconsiderations. In fact, my main qualm with the book is that it is packaged as “DIY” and as a “manual” (this kind of marketing is endemic to the genre; very few books on writing, if any, attempt to turn you into a free agent with all the instruction you might ever need), when in reality, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow is more accurately described in the introduction as “a compendium of insights,” and on every page Almond seems to promise that the things he wants to share are real, and fixed, and will never let us go it alone, not really.

Like any good mixtape, the book is surprisingly eclectic, offering a diversity of references from Aristotle to E.M. Forster, from Kristen Roupenian to Megha Majumdar. Key concepts and arguments are featured like pop/rock Side-A staples (e.g., writing is a spiritual survival mechanism, conflict must be internalized, “Slow down where it hurts,” etc.) bookended with deep-cut B Sides (Almond clarifies the distinction between emotional diffraction and emotional equilibrium; he argues for an cognitive relationship between writing creative nonfiction and narrativizing childhood trauma). There is also a great deal of plain-spoken practical wisdom, such as the fact that it is often perfectly fine to tell instead of show. He reminds us that plot events are causal, not simply sequential. “Kill your darlings” becomes a dilation on why our characters should not be protected from the consequences of their situation.

Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow is for any serious student of writing. It is not too technical or laden with theory. More importantly, Almond’s primer is not a Gardner-esque appeal for a particular ethic, or aesthetic. Instead we are presented with a pragmatic statement that honest writing requires artistic integrity, or at least a soundness of intention—knowledge that, for many of us, came only from trial and error, and an omnivorous literary appetite. This is the boon of Almond’s anthological, mix-tape approach: the collage effect enables a careful curation of the bad old days of American Fiction™, informed and invigorated by new ideas from our current, more pluralistic, post-tweed era. Writing teachers always feel the weight of history, and we know that separating our babies from our bathwater is a delicate and mindful process. Thankfully, Almond has already done much of that work, making Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow an essentially ideal text to assign to the introductory creative-writing workshop. Will our students be cursed to wrestle with his voice, his values, and his point of view, bouncing around in their skulls for years to come? Sure, but you know—kind of in a good way.