ninaherenorthere.com

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.