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I rarely read books twice, but I recently picked up a copy of Augusten Burrough’s, Dry, from the library for a second go around.

“Why would pick that one again? My friend, a voracious re-reader of high quality literature, asked.

“Because I want to figure out how to write mass-market best-selling page-turning crap.” I said. “I’m looking for inspiration”

My MFA cost too much money for an answer like that, but it was the truth. By page 70, I wanted to chuck the book out the window. It reads like a skeletal screenplay with some decent one-liners. I did learn how much a good joke can mask a bad description and how much a tight narrative can mask pages and pages of generic dialogue. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve read bad, yet totally competent writing. And the book couldn’t have been that awful. I cried around page 175, although it should be known I also cry during Lifetime movies.

Sadly, the book was an inspiration to me. I don’t remember the last time I put down a book and felt capable of writing my own publishable book. I can do what he does; I really can; I may even be able to do it better.

Three Cups of Tea (Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, but mostly Relin, I’d guess) – I read this because everywhere I went — muni, the doctor’s office, work, the gym — someone was carrying around a copy. Because so many people were reading it, I figured the circle on the front cover (not shown here) was for Oprah’s Book Club. But it turns out the circle is for the Kiriyama Prize (a $15,000 prize) recognizing “outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia…”

Basically, this is Mortenson’s story: He gets lost in the remote reaches of northern Pakistan after a failed attempt at K2 and because of the local hospitality promises to return to the village and build a school. He goes back to the States without a clue about how to do this, lives out of a car (called La Bamba) and a storage unit in Berkeley, and ends up starting his own non-profit and building all these schools (with an emphasis on girls’ education) in Muslim areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan that we (those of us who are dumb that is) associate with American-hating terrorists. Seriously, this is an uplifting, inspiring story. Mortenson for president! As long as he takes Relin as his speech writer.

My guess is award winning journalist, David Oliver Relin, did all of the writing. This is some high quality narrative nonfiction, a page-turner of a story complete with the contextual depth that comes from tying the story into current events (9/11 occurs during the span of the story) and the climbing history of the area. The landscape of northern Pakistan is described with such precision and beauty (who knew ice could be so magical?) it makes me want to risk life and limb and 3-4 days worth of travel to get there. Some of the writing about the area is forced (especially with climbing metaphors), but there are really only so many ways to describe the crags on the mountains and the endless snow fields. I also have some gripes about the story itself, which had all the elements of a summer movie blockbuster — romance, action, a happy ending – all tied up with a nice litle bow. But in a buyer’s market, this is what passes for good salable narrative.

Motherless Brooklyn (Jonathen Lethem) – I guess I was on an award kick, because this novel won the National Book Award in 1999. While I’m sure I missed half of Lethem’s brilliance, his play on the lineage of hard-boiled detective stories, I was impressed by the protaganist. The guy had Tourette’s. Can you imagine writing an entire book from the first-person perspective of someone with verbal and physical tics and not driving the reader nuts? With his words, Lethem can express more in one paragraph than I will ever ever be able to in my career as a writer.

Dreams From My Father (Barack Obama. Potentially with the help of a ghost writer?) I read this because I’d heard it was especially “literary,” and it is. The memoir is broken up into three parts — childhood with mother and grandparents and step-dad in Hawaii and Indonesia, post-collegiate community organizing in Chicago, soul searching visit to Kenya to meet his father’s side of the family. For the most part, the book reads as Obama’s story to reconcile his mulitracial, multiethnic, multicultural heritage; a quest for an identity that feels authentic, all-encompassing, and honest; and the search for a life purpose that takes identity, family, and community into consideration. All things that are universal human endeavors, and throughout most of the book, truly resonated with me.

One of my issues had to do with the remarkable amount of detail, and perhaps this is my issue with memoirs, in general. This memoir had hundreds of scenes. And in each one, the clothing, facial expresssions, haircuts of characters met only for seconds are perfectly rendered, as is the wallpaper of rooms, the trim of the buildings, and the number of steps on houses. Either Obama kept a damn good journal, or a bunch of researchers pulled pictures and found all sorts of facts for him, or he is like Augusten Burroughs, who claims to be able to relive his scenes as he writes them, capturing every element with factual accuracy.

Aside from reading this article and this one about Obama’s books, I don’t know much about his writing process, like how long it took, how much help did he have? Is he just one of those uber-smart individuals who can figure out how to write a book simply by calling upon a lifetime (or in his case, 30-something years) of reading. When I first picked up the book, I was naive enough to think Obama wrote it without presidential aspirations in mind. The official occasion for the book was that he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. But as the Obama article in the recent issue of the New Yorker (the one with the “satirical” cover) makes clear, he’s been thinking about his political prospects for a long time and a great deal of thought probably went into this memoir as far as building a future political platform, especially as sets in print, now and forever, his journey to a racial identity.

I must confess. I couldn’t read about 20-30 pages near the end of the memoir. He was in Kenya and went on and on and on about his brother’s father’s dad’s sister’s uncle, as told by his mother’s sister’s son. It reminded me of really bad creative nonfiction workshop. Someone always comes in and says she wants to record her family story for “posterity,” and it just means I’m going to be subjected to one long dinner conversation from Aunt Maggie’s. By the end of the book, Obama seems to have forgotten the most important point of a good memoir is not to tell your life story, but to make the story larger than your life. This memoir was mostly great, but did not have to be anywhere near 400+ pages. Less is more, buddy.

Lately, I’ve been turning to the author’s note in nonfiction books for guidance about writing. I think this has something to do with my MFA program. There were only two kinds of classes, one where we offered feedback to each other on our shitty first drafts and another where we read literary masterpieces. How to get from a shitty first draft to a masterpiece was never covered. The how is in the writing process, of course, but in nonfiction I always get hung up on the extra element, the translation of “truth” into story. Or more specifically, I get hung up on truth.

The following is the opening of an author’s note from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.

“This is a true story. In order to make its rendition tolerable, certain moments in it have been gently altered–by compressing or inverting the time line, making various people taller or shorter, blithely skipping over unpleasantness, inventing dialogue, as necessary.”

Some of this I consider to be standard for memoir writing and completely acceptable. “Blithely skipping over unpleasantness” is what I consider omitting. It’s the scalpel that cuts the arc of the story, and without it, we’d be reading play-by-plays of people’s lives. The rendition would not be tolerable. This line also tells me that for the most part, Boylan chose to shape her story around the positive aspects of her experience. We all have that right.

“Compressing and inverting the time line.” Fine, I’ll take it. For the sake of tension and Freitag’s pyramid, and for a compelling page-turner of a book. I feel like “gently altered” borders on being an oxymoron, but it’s not. It’s probably a great example of what my teachers meant about the importance of making perfect word choices.

“Making various people taller or shorter” is changing physical attributes of characters. Not a big deal. But the line is kinda offhanded, like she’s sitting in a wicker rocking chair, smoking a Virgina Slims, tossing a hand over her shoulder as she says, “Tall, short, fat, thin, old, young, no matter.”

Here’s where I get stuck: “Inventing dialogue.” It’s like she’s giving up any pretense of truth. Invent means to create, or to concoct and fabricate. To me, “inventing dialogue” implies that no effort was spent trying to remember the dialogue, as if that would be too much for a reader to expect. Boylan uses dialogue for pacing, and in one scene, I think she put words in a doctor’s mouth, for the purpose of lending them authority.

What are we left with after tossing Boylan a bone for not using composite characters? Well, she altered, gently, the plot, characters, and dialouge, which means the setting is super accurate. The fiction writers I know also often aim for truth in setting.

Perhaps the point then is one that I hear often. Fiction and nonfiction aren’t very different. Fiction has to be believable, and nonfiction has to be salable, I mean constructed, and both have to employ similar techniques in order to be stories. And that’s what Boylan’s book is, a story, and I understand that in the meaningful ways, the ones that are emotionally resonant, her story is 100% true.

To easily categorize this book, it is a transsexual memoir. Somewhere in the back of my mind, even though I know the answer, I wonder why it couldn’t exist as a novel, why the curiosity factor wouldn’t hold up if it were simply a story. Would I feel any better if nonfiction books said, “Based on a true story,” like the movies?

Maybe it would have no impact. I don’t feel duped as a reader, but as a writer. I feel duped into trying to be truthful. That’s not entirely true. My philosophy is don’t get caught. I embellish for humor’s sake. I constantly remind myself that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it makes whatever sound I want it to make. I invent my thoughts with the abandon of someone who knows that scientists have not developed a mind-reader to verify them.

But as I learn from continually reading author’s notes, there is a better philosophy than “don’t get caught.” It’s own up to whatever you did, descriptive white lies and made-up conversations, then explain it at the end of the book, where nobody will see it.

There is a post today on the New York Times’ book blog, Paper Cuts, that combines March Madness and creative writing graduate programs, two of my favorite subjects. The goal of the post was to find Cinderella writing schools, the lowly ranked MFA programs that produce a surprising number of graduates on best seller lists. The results are inconclusive (i.e. nonexistent) and the post serves only to prompt MFA bashing and MFA justifying in the comments section.

Scanning the blog post, I hoped that my program at the University of San Francisco (USF) would be like the NCAA basketball tournament’s Davidson, an underdog to watch out for. Unfortunately, USF is ranked #83 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, and if the NCAA graduate writing tournament is anything like the basketball tournament, there’s only room for 64 teams in the bracket. Hello, NIT.

But really, #83? There are three writing programs in our backyard — San Francisco State (#46), Saint Mary’s (#50) and Mills (#62) — that are ranked higher. There are schools in Hawaii and Alaska that beat us. Two schools in the top ten, Michigan and Arizona, are even basketball powerhouses, too.

None of this was news to me. When I tell people about my writing program and they respond positively, I usually point out that they are thinking about SF State not my USF. Also, when I initially looked into programs, I discovered the highly ranked schools focus on fiction and poetry and many lack nonfiction tracks entirely. Since I write nonfiction, the list is useless. As is my graduate degree, which not only says, “The Society of Jesus” on it (damn, Jesuits), but comes from a lowly #83 school.

In my family, personal worth is directly correlated with the ranking of the person’s undergraduate school. Every year my mom pored over the U.S. News and World Report with the rankings. To this day, when I’m at a magazine rack and see the famous annual issue, I check for my undergraduate university, hoping that some useless category like alumna giving will keep it in the Top 5, just behind Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (three of which rejected me).

I fell for all of the crap when I was younger–the competition, the grades, the importance of going to a top ranked school. I like to think I’m past all that ranking stuff now, but the truth is, I’m not. Going to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop might not have made me a better writer than going to USF, but getting into Iowa would’ve proven that I’m a good writer from the start. And the people who say all it takes to be good at anything is hard work are fools; it takes talent, too. A lot of it. A basic grasp of language and grammar helps, and even with my degree, I’m still figuring out how to use basic punctuation.

But I do want to say that the University of San Francisco has a terrific MFA degree program, and at least some of the instructors went to top ranked writing programs. They are shellshocked. What I learned from them is this: The better the program the more horror stories you will have, and your book advance won’t cover the cost of lifelong therapy.

Next year, perhaps US News will rank the MFA programs by tuition, and perhaps the NY Times book blog will tell us how much money the author of a non best-selling book can expect to make. Then all of us writers will have some truly useful information.

I read Daniel Alarcon’s collection of short stories, War by Candlelight, by accident. I had wanted to read a book, something that would propel me on from page fifty, not end at page ten and start again at page eleven. And I didn’t want to read something true or mostly true or information heavy, what is commonly thought of as nonfiction. I wanted to lose myself in a novel, Alarcon’s new novel, Lost City Radio. He’s part of my obsession with local authors. He lives in Oakland (and is originally from Peru and grew up in Alabama). I’ve heard him read twice, both times from a short story about a modern day gay Abraham Lincoln. It was a bit like fan fiction, or what I consider fan fiction, which to me means turning all the characters gay and then fantasizing about them doing it. I guess Alarcon’s story was more like literary political fan fiction, or maybe just a story. Perhaps if I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop like he did, I could categorize it. This guy is virtually my age, barely thirty. I fantasize about having his career and his hair. Alarcon has great hair. It is brown, thick and overgrown, wavy with just enough grease to tame the frizz. He’s hot in that disheveled writer way, and I’m into the future of the book business, where it’s not about the books themselves, but the persona of the author, the author’s sex appeal, his hair.

Since I couldn’t get the novel at the library, I borrowed the stories. I read the acknowledgments section first, as I always seem to do, and learned that his very first short story was published by Granta or Zoetrope or somewhere uber-literari like that. People say it’s hard to sell short stories in the current marketplace and this seems to be true, because whenever I come across the collection of a first-time writer, he or she will inevitably write in the acknowledgments, “Thank you to the New Yorker for publishing my first story and taking a chance on me.” There are the few, the talented, the published.

I proceeded to rip through the entire collection, reading them out of order, but in my own noncommittal order of the shortest story to the longest. I have a thing against 40 page short stories or articles. I like to read anything that’s not a novel in one sitting, but I don’t always have time or the focus to read 40 pages. I find long-short standalone stories or articles daunting. The mental investment is high and then it’s over. However, once I started Alarcon’s stories, I could not stop. It was one page-turner of a short story collection, and I moved easily from one teary ending to the next bold opening. “Science of Being Alone” turned on my waterworks, and not just a pooling in my eyes but a splatter onto the page. That story and that last paragraph captured all that is hopeless, fated and lost in love, while also managing to show the pride and acceptance of the defeated. It’s a moment when you want to scream at the protagonist, “Don’t do it you. Don’t do it,” and (maybe it’s because the other character screams it, as well), but when the protagonist does it, bending down on one knee for his annual marriage proposal, it’s only then that you realize he is stronger than you will ever be. The act is not particularly original, but the depth and complexity of the characters and the arc of the story is so well developed that the ending is a light squeeze to the heart.

I think the title, War by Candlelight, which is also a title of one of the stories, sets the mood for the collection. Each character is in a sense at war, and regardless of whether the battle is waged on the streets of Lima or in a small apartment in New York, on the outskirts of a prison or an earthquake shattered town or in the mind of a soon-to-be illegal immigrant, the characters are all fighting for survival. For pennies, for freedom, for love and meaning. And the stakes are death or akin to death. Bombs, bullets, poverty, prison. The stories are like flares shot from a deserted island or matches burnt inside a cave, dim sources of hope in the vastness of despair. When you read a good short story, it’s as if the small selection of scenes and moments become emblematic of an entire life, as if you’ve been given everything in a few pages to understand all that is this person. A good short story tells of worlds and places and experiences that that are foreign yet common. These ones are terrific, quietly explosive. They’re really worth reading.