Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow Quotes

“Plot, in other words, resides in establishing a clear chain of consequence. Not this happens and this happens and this happens. But: this happens, therefore that happens. And because that happened, this next thing happens. My scenes needed to expose hidden truths (Recognition), upend expectations (Reversal), escalate tension, and instigate further action.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“But most important of all is the structure of the incidents.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“Comedy is rooted in this capacity to face painful truths and to offer, by means of laughter, a dividend of forgiveness. I learned this from Lorrie Moore, among others.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“This is the one area where fiction faces a greater challenge than nonfiction. In the world of nonfiction, we are damned to tell stories from the life we’ve led, one in which inhibition often trumps desire. In fiction, it is our duty to engineer the plot so as to slam our characters up against their desires. Readers arrive hoping for vicarious forms of ruin.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“If you’re confused about which scenes belong in your story, start by asking the elemental question: What work is this scene doing? Is there Recognition? Is there Reversal? Are you introducing or escalating conflict? Instigating subsequent action?”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“FOR MOST OF HUMAN HISTORY, we’ve relied on storytellers. Their myths and histories offered a cohesive vision of our origins, our moral codes, our mortal fate. Eventually these stories were preserved, duplicated, and made portable. The teller was supplanted by the writer, who deployed a guide called the narrator. As writers sought to reckon with the growing complexity of human affairs, they relied more and more on this figure.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“Rock Springs by Richard Ford:”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“Michael Cunningham’s White Angel leaps to mind:”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“Let’s let Sylvia Plath field that one. She begins The Bell Jar with a searing, firsthand account of the disturbances prowling inside Esther Greenwood.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“At the other end of the spectrum is a novel such as Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell:”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“From a temporal standpoint, our lives proceed in one direction. From a psychic and emotional standpoint, we’re all over the place. Rarely do we live in the present. We live in our memories and our fantasies, our fears and regrets, what happened five minutes ago and what might happen next year. This makes storytelling tricky. If you proceed strictly by time stamp, you’re missing out on this simultaneity. If you hopscotch around without clear guidance, your reader will get disoriented.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“At the bottom of the ocean you might find a pearl Don’t let your heart get broken by this world —DAN BERN”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“Claiming the role of storyteller doesn’t give us a franchise on the truth. Indeed, it may trigger feelings of grandiosity that flatten out those around us. Most difficult of all, we have to tell the parts of the story that we are most apt to hide, even from ourselves: that our antagonist was sometimes kind and even tender to us, that we once clung to them with a fierce loyalty, that they proved too weak and damaged to protect us, that beneath all the swirling rancor is an ache that binds us together.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“Writing is an attention racket. But it’s also a forgiveness racket. The best way to keep going when the anxiety of exposure strikes is to remember that your goal is to forgive everyone involved, yourself foremost. A great story, of whatever sort, is not a monument to sorrow or destruction. It is a precise accounting of the many ways in which our love gets distorted, a secular expression of spiritual forbearance.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“You can safely assume that if you are consciously obsessed with something right now, you’re going to have trouble writing about it well. Why? Because its full significance has not yet become clear to you. And because you yourself, as you currently exist, are not yet clear to you. Didion’s essay is an elegant compendium of moments from her New York years, the moments she has been unable to forget. These are not the expected landmarks—her first big break, or heartbreak—but quieter episodes that have come to symbolize the experience: the exaltation of eating a peach on Lexington Avenue at twilight; the dejection of watching “the long panels of transparent golden silk” hung in her window become “tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms.” I am constantly imploring students to pay special attention to anything they can’t forget. If an image, or interaction, or sensation, or snatch of dialogue snags in your consciousness, it bears investigation.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“not quoting. The other risk is technical and impossible to avoid: an obsessive text is, by its nature, hopelessly biased, and this bias comes at the cost of perspective. We are left without a reliable guide. This, I suspect, is why so many novels about obsessives are written by secondary characters—see: The Bluest Eye, My Brilliant Friend, Gatsby, etc.—who are capable of sympathizing with the afflicted while offering the insight that comes with distance.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“Then office hours would roll around and the author in question would appear and I would say, “I found your story really ambitious, but I’m not sure I totally understood it.” The author would look at me, with pity, and utter the six words I eventually learned to dread: “Have you seen the movie Memento?”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“TIME MANAGEMENT IS AN AUTHORIAL DUTY that gets delegated to the narrator. In”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“Here are the two essential questions to consider: Where, in the larger flow of events, have I chosen to enter the story? How did my central character arrive at this moment, and what’s at stake for her?”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“Consider our first encounter with Gatsby, that smile he flashes Nick Carraway, which, we are told, “seemed to face the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.” Nick’s sustained focus on a single smile allows us to glimpse the fraudulence and insecurity lurking beneath Gatsby’s magnetic charm. Fitzgerald knows his hero better than Gatsby knows himself and is able to convey his core identity with shocking efficiency.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

“What we're doing as writers is convincing strangers to translate our specks of ink into stories capable of generating rescue.”
― Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories