ARE YOU SURE EVERYTHING IS OK?

I was casually mooching about on You Tube the other day, not really paying huge attention to every video that popped up, but just letting them wash over me, when I stumbled over a clip from a legal TV show. The details of the clip don’t matter but one of the comments under the video did make me think.

Someone pointed out that one of the big issues with the show in question is that the characters could save themselves hours upon hours of worry by just being open and honest with each other and asking for help when they need it.

We’ve all been there.

Something happens and we can feel it in our bones that we want to just get the issue resolved without drawing any undue attention to it. We try to fix that which went wrong and despite our best efforts, things spiral and all of a sudden, everyone knows and are pointing at you. We see in stories, how characters try to fix something and their attempts to do so are what ultimately cause the biggest issue that everyone then has to fix.

One way that this reluctance to admit to a problem is used in story telling regularly pops up in zombie tales. There’s always the situation where someone gets bitten but decides that trying to hide said fact will be the best course of action. The truth ultimately gets out when it’s far too late to achieve anything and chaos ensues. I’m writing something at the moment which uses this idea of hiding an issue and although it’s not about zombie bites, the general premise is the same.

In the zombie example, the characters very often recognise that they’ll need to be killed if they share the fact of the bite and thankfully, that doesn’t happen out here in the real world. We hope. In the good old day to day world we all enjoy, reaching out for help can be the first step to making a problem go away but it’s that act of reaching out which can be the toughest.

We see regularly online, at work, on TV etc. so many examples of encouragement to reach out for help if you need it but it can be the reaction that we receive which is the killer. Can you imagine phoning up The Samaritans help line and when you pour out your concerns the person on the other end just laughs at you or tells you you’re a prick for getting it wrong? I’m writing characters who have to face something along these lines and it’s that crushing of them following a problem which has caused them all so much pain and then shapes their behaviour from then on. The book I’m reading at the moment also deals with the idea of ridicule for people who’ve made a mistake of a certain kind.

And that’s the core message really.

We all make mistakes, and none of us can go through life totally separate from everyone else so the idea of accepting help from another can’t be so alien a concept that no-one thought of it. The reluctance to accept help comes from how that help makes a person feel. One of my characters shrugs their shoulders and just gets back on the horse, as it were, but for another it breeds a resentment grown from a shame they were made to feel at their own failure.

Characters then want to prove those who pointed and laughed wrong, they want their redemption, and it’s in that fertile ground we can grow either a hero or a villain.

Maybe we all just act a bit nicer to each other?

We’re all after some kind of redemption.

Stay safe all.