Cris de Borja

It’s dusk on the east side of Snoqualmie Pass, and my little group, unfamiliar with this side of the Cascade Mountains, is trying to find a place for a stargazing picnic. We pulled off Interstate 90 and discovered that our chosen spot required a Discover trail pass after sunset, something that we forgot about in our spontaneity. One of our number pokes at his phone. The screen casts a night light glow inside the care while he calls out navigation to the driver. He has Google Maps up, and has found a tiny neighborhood park nearby. We get a chance to eat our sandwiches by starlight after all.

Contrast this to the more recent night of a friend’s birthday party. Again, my group is in an unfamiliar neighborhood, but this one is in the urban wilderness. It is, in fact, in a part of the city that the birthday girl warned us was the “Bothell Triangle,” a GPS thwarting conjunction of overlapping city borders not unlike the Bermuda Triangle. We’re on foot, trying to find the party house that is supposed to be a short walk away from the Park and Ride. However, this time the maps app is failing us utterly. We end up calling for help, and the host and hostess come to pick us up. Later, I find out that another guest tried for half an hour to find the house, but her car’s navigation system sent her elsewhere.

In the not-so-distant past, I carried a Thomas Guide map book in my car, at least ever since getting lost in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles and finding myself in Echo Park at midnight (not a great combination for a very young woman alone in her car, circa 1992). Before my acquisition of a smart phone, I planned ahead and wrote down directions. Along the same lines, I remember when people were more patient to wait for someone who was late, in the times before cellular phones.

I like to write about how ordinary people use technology. Whether it’s clockwork and steam engines or smart phones or cryosleep chambers, my characters are shaped by the technologies of their worlds. Much of the time, ordinary people — especially urban denizens — don’t have a whole lot of choice about using tech. In a race to offer consumers the most to purchase, industry pushes the newest technology and packages it through marketing as essential to… life, happiness, and everything.

Technology is perceived as a male dominated industry, but around me I see that everyone uses tech. Computers are common in city workplaces and households. In Seattle, it can look like everyone not only has a mobile phone but a smart phone, there is an assumption of internet access and usage, and fewer than six degrees separate any one person from someone earning her daily bread in a technology job. According to a recent article in Forbes, the Seattle area is top ranked in the country for technology jobs. In my every day I see women using technology along the entire spectrum. I know women who have their own servers, and I know women whose highest tech usage is listening to music on a portable mp3 player.

It’s fascinating to me to see how some people embrace technology, and whether they do it because it excites them (geeks, pretty much anything) or because it keeps them at the top of a particular social class (hipsters, first to have iPhones). Then there are others who accept tech consciously, often grudgingly, and those who accept tech without thinking much about it.  Those who grew up in the age of computers are probably easier about accepting the latest gadget than those of us who remember ditto purple.

A simple truth of technology is that embodies change. In the context of an individual, that place of change is the dynamic of story.

The funny thing is, technology and how it affects a person is always more interesting when it breaks. (Just imagine if one of James Bond’s secret weapons didn’t work. What would 007 do?) Since it is supposed to make our lives easier, it is designed to make us dependent on it. I think we can all relate to that moment where something in the background becomes the focus of our attention because of the obstruction it has become.  I’ve been in many an office setting where the copier breaks, taking our fax with it, and workday gridlock ensues. I’ve experienced text messaging fail often enough to create protocols for that method of communication. How often has an empty printer cartridge, dead battery, or burned out light bulb been an obstacle to things running smoothly?

Maybe it’s the poor tailor who is first to get a sewing machine, or the wounded space pirate with the outdated robotic leg. Maybe it’s the child who is replicated, or the thief who is caught because of a phone, or an engineer whose field of work becomes banned. Any of these are characters whose stories I will want to tell.

Bob Ross’s recent birthday put me in mind of some of his quotable sayings. A funny, musical remix of these can be found on the PBS website and YouTube. The PBS Digital Studios series, remixed by John D. Boswell, also includes videos for Mr. Rogers and Julia Child. What the creators of these videos have done is highlight the phrases of inspiration that each of those icons gave us.

Julia Child encourages us to “keep on cooking!” and advises us that “freshness is essential.” Mr. Rogers tells us that we can grow ideas in the gardens of our minds. Bob Ross puts a spin on mistakes, which are, he says, not mistakes but “happy accidents.” He also says something that rings very true to me: “every day is a good day when you paint.”

Any kind of creation or act that brings joy — such as writing — is that act of “painting” that makes any day a good one. It’s an inspiring thought. Just by doing that one thing, a person can make any day into a good day. Everyone is creative in some way. To express oneself in a tangible way is a natural urge of being human.

I think that every day that I write is a good day. (I also think that any day that contains a cup of tea and some chocolate is a good day, but that’s a musing for another time.) Writing fulfills a fundamental need. I don’t, as some writers say, “live to write.” Rather, writing gives my life fullness. Writing processes the marvel that is living into an elixir of wonder. When I’m lucky, it also results into a story that I want to share.

As Julia Child says, freshness is essential. Freshness has a broad meaning, as anyone who cooks knows. Dried spices and aged meats can be fresh. Sundried tomatoes have a flavor distinct from tomatoes freshly picked. In the same way, I like to draw from many sources to give my writing the bright flavor notes that I want. Ingredients are everywhere. We readers like familiar elements in our reading, but we want them to have that all important freshness, too.

I don’t have the green thumb that my mother had, but I like to think that the garden of my mind is as green and well tended as Mr. Rogers wanted all of our minds to be. I picture it as a sprawling, fruitful place with winding paths, wide open fields in the sunlight, and hidden grottos.

Ideas that I don’t quite remember planting in that particular plot often pop up. I have to wonder if even the weeds that escape pulling and thrive are “happy accidents” of their own. After all, the only difference between a weed and a desirable plant is that we want it. If you garden, just think of mint! In the Pacific Northwest, blackberry bramble is a formidable foe, but that doesn’t mean that the berries aren’t sweet in the summer. In a concrete-paved city, the sight of morning glory winding its way along a power line is an image of beauty.

It’s all perspective, of course. I am not a naturally positive thinker, I admit. Every day is a good day when I write because I have decided that it is so. I write, therefore it is a good day.

Writing is about perspective, about giving the reader an opportunity to look through another person’s eyes. Reading not only developes the ability to understand another person’s perspective, it gives readers tools to change the reader’s own perspective. For the duration of a story, a reader gets to try out being someone else, someone else’s decision making and reactions. Sometimes, the character is someone that we imagine is a better version of ourselves. We can take that perspective with us when the story is over; it makes it just a little easier to change our own thinking to that better version.

A good friend of mine argues with me about what makes a book good. My friend’s stance is that there are some books that writers like and some books that readers like. Personal taste includes this factor. I argue with my friend on this because it dismays me that I would have to pick a side; I consider myself a reader, foremost. After all, reading is all enjoyment, and writing requires work!

Joking aside, I’ve been reading for much longer than I ever thought to write down one of my daydreams as stories or songs as poems. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read. I dont’ thing that I was me until I had that skill.

This last weekend, I met up with the local mystery lovers book group. The group is very well organized, and I was impressed at how well we stayed on topic. Since everyone was given a chance to speak, I got to listen to the insights of a varied group of intelligent readers. It was fascinating to hear the authors’ works discussed by people whose tastes are not known to me. For the novel that we had all read in common (A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss), each reader had different reasons for enjoying or not enjoying the book.

It’s not that readers don’t appreciate the writer’s craft, but that they are able to see if the craft is effective. If a person is not looking closely at the cogs and gears, that person can still tell if the machinery is working. For the readers that didn’t like the storytelling style of the mystery that we read, the reaction was “it didn’t work for me.” The perspective of a writer is more typically, “I see what the author was doing, but it didn’t come together for me.” It was a similar case with the readers who did enjoy the novel. They felt engaged with the characters, setting, and story. I realized that I my praise was for how using the first-person perspective kept the reader’s information limited, how the use of dialog enhanced the setting, and how the author created tension in the narrative. My view was, when contrasted with a “pure” readers view, very focused on structure and craft.

I know that I am often distracted by how a story is built. Sometimes this means that I want to rant to anyone who will listen about where I thought the author should have known better, where I disagree with the author’s (not the characters’) choices. More often, it is the nuts and bolts of the novel or short story that enchant me. I can thoroughly enjoy a book that I wouldn’t recommend, entirely because of its elements. I’ve also recommended books that I didn’t enjoy, because I could deconstruct what didn’t work for me and how it would be more likely to work for the other person.

This is not unlike how I feel about beadwork. I bead, and browsing through the treasures of a bead store is at least as much fun as crafting and wearing a finished piece. Each bead itself is a contained beauty. Sculptural beadwork jewelry is often, in my opinion, grotesquely overdone, yet even when I think that a piece is ugly as a whole, I like to look at it with a crafter’s eye and appreciate the components and stitches.

Or maybe a book is like a salad. A wide variety of vegetables, cheese, prepared meats, or nuts can go into a salad. If well crafted, the salad elements will be harmonious in a way that many will enjoy. Yet a salad can contain many of my favorite things, and be enjoyable because of those separate elements, even if the whole doesn’t come together into something I want to serve to a lunch guest. Readers are the guest to a meal, while writers are the ones preparing the meal.

Along those lines, I’m of the opinion that you should “never trust a skinny cook.” Someone who identifies as a writer but does not read has got it all wrong. Writing without reading is pontificating without ever listening to another person’s viewpoint. Being a reader is fundamental to being a writer, and writers who read a variety of fiction and non-fiction are those best at their craft. It’s not enough just to live in the world that we have and have experiences; reading puts us in a different window seat from our own minds. Writers of mystery, speculative fiction, and other genre can draw from classic literature, popular fiction, theater, history, hard science, social science, and more to create the world beyond the window. This is what the masters of writing do.

Women outnumber men. This is true of the planet as a whole and true of the United States. The most recent U.S. census shows that while the numbers have moved a little bit toward balance in a generation, the population is still predominantly female. It has been since we first started counting the census here.
Nevertheless, our culture puts men in central roles. Male characters overpopulate fiction, where even background characters are frequently male default. Even when I did a Google search for “ratio of” the search suggestions all started with “men to women” instead of the other way around! It’s so commonplace for stories to be about men that it didn’t occur to me until adulthood that it was out of balance with the world around me. I hadn’t minded reading novels with mostly male characters because the characters were interesting and the stories were good.
Of course, there have been notable exceptions all along. The first ones that spring to mind are the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which aren’t fiction, and Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Sweeping out a few more cobwebs from my brain, I seem to recall that the Oz series by Frank L. Baum had lots of female characters — from Dorothy and Glinda to Polychrome and the Patchwork Girl — having adventures.
It becomes much more difficult to think of a movie that isn’t a “chick flick” that has more than two or three female characters lost among a cast of male characters. Unfortunately, there is a gender desert between movies with dominantly female casts and movies with typical casting. When the disparity started tickling my awareness, I started looking for entertainment where the cast was reasonably balanced at around fifty-fifty. Ensemble television shows seem to do better than the movies.
One show that I like, Leverage, does fairly well. The main cast is a group of only two women to three men. However, the minor and incidental characters are just as likely to be women as men. (Minor characters are also likely to be cast with “minority” actors in the roles.) After all, why not have a woman bartender and a male kindergarten teacher? Unless the choice becomes jarring to the audience in a way that is distracting to the story, it makes sense to me to populate fiction the way the real world is populated.
The world of books is somewhat better. Female protagonists are likely to have the support of other female characters, while still having male characters important to her story.
The reality of everyday is that workplaces and social places frequently slope to gather greater numbers of one gender or another. In a public crowd, I see a distribution that matches our census numbers. Socially, I interact with more women at this time. My workplace has shifted from one side to the other over several years, for no particular reason. When similar distributions happen in fiction, it may be intentional, to forward the mood of the story or tell us something about the main character. I’d like that to be the rule and not the exception. We shouldn’t be forgetting to include over 50% of our human population.