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.

ONE SMALL STEP

I’ve just finished reading a book which dealt with characters having to take steps to change the far future following a message sent back through time. It was set in 1920’s rural England and didn’t hold all of the classic time travel decorations of vehicles to accomplish the jump and wild and advanced science. Instead, it was told on a much smaller scale with all of the action unfolding between at maximum three characters, and that size of story is something which appealed to me.

I’ve written books which encompass sweeping tales of good and evil, and massive scope for intrigue and peril, but stripping away so much of the superfluous information can lead us to a tighter and more accurate story.

The tale of changing the past to prevent some future catastrophe isn’t new. The idea of going back to kill Hitler before he got his head of steam going pops up a fair amount in books, film and TV, so much so that it tends to be as a throw away line to give quick explanation of what’s taking place at that point.

Dipping back into the past was embedded in Avengers Endgame and the scale was enormous. The Back to the Future films had the same idea but was more aimed in where our attention was focused but both these example had the characters seeing the time changes personally and then amending issues as they unfold.

But now consider that you don’t even get to see the problem yourself.

You’re told by the big booming voice from the future that to stop a terrible wrong in the far future you need to prevent a certain event now. You get a cursory overview as to the details but the rest is up to you. Could you trust that it’s for real? I suppose that would depend on the way things are presented to you but beyond the mechanics of time travel and the hard science of it all, the biggest hurdle to overcome would be the idea that just completing one miniscule task now could save lives in a thousand years.

It’s all too easy to just look at ourselves and what we do as being the tiniest speck in the grand tapestry of all of reality but even a single dropped stitch in that tapestry can have an effect.

I went to the beach today and had a wander about, getting some fresh air and I picked up and put down a few stones as I went. They just looked interesting and I wanted to have a look see. All good fun. But when I’d finished my assessment, I dropped them back on the beach, but in new positions. What’s to say that by me putting that stone where I did, I set in motion a cascade of events that means that in a thousand years it’s a fragment of that rock which results in the event which kills millions? If I hadn’t picked it up, no far off event?

We’ve all been told to see the big picture at some point but maybe we’ve been looking the wrong way? If any and all tiny events have the chance to warp the future, maybe we can see ourselves as being just that little bit more powerful, and by extension, that much more invested in the world around us.

Every action matters.

Stay safe all.

THERE’S NO MALICE, BUT STILL

Sherlock Holmes was working against Professor Moriarty in the books. Harry Potter had Voldemort. Everyone had Big Brother in 1984. So very many stories are built on the bricks of conflict between the good guys and the bad guys in one shape of another and we all recognise how the conflict can make things interesting but our lives aren’t always filled with day after day of turmoil and oppression from an evil person or group. We find conflict in the real world but very often, we’re working to overcome, not the twirling moustache of the classic black hat, but day to day problems.

Moriarty had his nefarious schemes and Holmes was trying to counter him but for all of us, the hurdles we’re trying to overcome are making sure our salary stretches between pay days or how can get from here to there despite the roadworks. Holmes was fighting someone who was actively trying to hinder him, whereas we all just work against the other moving parts of the world around us.

Us mere mortals are all out there trying to do the best we can and it’s the natures of the different systems around us that we have to manage our way through, but the roads being full and blocked because everyone is heading to work and school at the same time can also be vastly overtaken by something even less predictable.

Mother Nature can be an amazing adversary in a story.

A pretty old story had the efforts of a group of people to save themselves from an impending mega-flood. They know that the clock is counting down and they know that without their efforts, they’ll all be destroyed so everyone is forced to prepare to resist the mighty force coming their way and when it does arrive, and they’ve been successful in their efforts, the story ends with the raw energy of the flood waters having been overcome and the people are the heroes.

Think of disaster films like 2012, Geostorm, Greenland, The Day After Tomorrow, and they all share the same kind of idea as Noah and his Ark.

The human race has advanced in terms of technology, in terms of knowledge, in terms its ability to exert control on everything all around it, so very often, conflicts that fill our stories rely on the frailties of our own wants and needs, wars between two opposing forces over resources or ideology. We can fully comprehend the push and pull of the stories because we can drop ourselves into the mindset of both sides. As an author, I need to make sure that when I write my villain, they have to be sympathetic because everyone believes they are the hero in their story, and it’s that humanity which we cling to as readers to show that we could be making those same choices if we’d been in their life.

But Mother Nature doesn’t have such humanity.

Mother Nature is just the world around us doing it’s thing and we just happen to be getting in the way. We may try to anthropomorphise nature to be a real mother figure who could then have a mind working behind any and all activities which unfold in the world around us but the truth is nature is a force so vast that even with all of the efforts of modern tech, the human race would be casually swatted aside if the conditions were right. One asteroid strike with a rock of 100km diameter and we’re all fucked, Bruce Willis or not. When our sun goes ‘nova, game over. These are things that are so far beyond us that we’d just have to just sit there and watch.

Mother Nature is a primal force that shapes all of us but when the time comes for her to really get her point across, all we can do is remember that she didn’t mean anything beyond doing the act which kills us all, or maybe we shouldn’t get her mad in the first place.

Stay safe all.

HOW DO THEY DO THAT?

If you’ve read or watched The Wizard of Oz, one of the big points of the story is how the wizard is not quite what he seems and getting beyond the first layer is an important part of how things roll out. The wizard is an almost mythical character with seemingly boundless powers but things rapidly change once the discovery is made of just what he can really do, and learning more truth can really make the world much more interesting.

How many magic shows have you seen?

There are talent shows on TV, as there have been in one form or another, for years and years, and very often, one of the acts that gets showcased is magic. Through the theatrical smoke and under the waves of moody lighting and music, our magicians sweep and whirl as they bends the forces of the world around us to their wills.

Objects disappear and then reappear.

People are sawed in half yet can still survive.

Animals were brought into the room when there were previously none visible.

Acts of mind reading of cards selected amaze us.

We sit agog as we witness the impossible and we have to grip tightly to the idea that we understand how the world works despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

But when you start to learn about all of the subtle details of prestidigitation, and discover the methods that go into presenting the image that is desired rather than the much more mechanical and mundane truth, it can go one of two ways.

Learning that the truth of such things is very far from magic could shatter any and all enjoyment of it in the future, or it could just strengthen the wonder as you begin to see just how much work goes into it.

I love to know.

I’ll be dazzled by the ‘trick’ like everyone else, and it’s great to be amazed, but finding out how these things are actually done makes my appreciation of them more rounded. Finding out the specifics was never a matter of breaking the magic to me, it meant more that I could see the different ingredients of the potion. Sure, mechanically, everyone should be able to complete the tricks but it falls to the individuals to really cast their own spell and sell what they’re doing, and we’d all know the difference between a good magician and a bad one, even if they were doing the same routine.

The ‘Making of’ features on films, the ‘How to’ guides of activities, even encyclopaedias and their pages of knowledge all hold the keys to an understanding of what’s all around us and the information out there can be something which gives answers while at the same time asking so many more. The more we learn of the secrets behind what we see, the wider the door swings, giving us more and more chance to really get out and explore what’s really going on, and just like the Wizard of Oz, knowing that the magic isn’t real doesn’t mean that it won’t work.

Stay safe all.

IS IT ALL IN THE DETAILS?

Who watched the rugby over the weekend?

There was more than enough excitement across the three matches of the opening weekend of this years Six Nations to paint an amazing picture to the whole planet of the absolute magic of the tournament, even if Wales lost!

The Wales v Scotland match was just bonkers.

At the end of the first half, the Wales performance was such that I thought they’d be lucky to score nil. The choices that were being made left everyone scratching their heads as Scotland just swept over for three tries and a 27-0 lead only a handful of minutes into the second half.

It was looking to be a very long day at the office indeed.

Then the lunacy exploded.

Some changes of players, some due to injury but most not, and the previous plans and arrangements were torched.

Wales began to just play.

The game finished 26-27 to Scotland, which was a fair reflection of the games in general but it brought back to mind a similarly crazy game from a few years ago where Scotland were being hammered by England and came back from 31-7 down at half time to have the win snatched from them at the end as England scored to take the scores to 38-38.

Both games had the players sticking to set plans but they just couldn’t get them to work in the first half, and the more they tried, the further away from success they got. The teams looked lifeless and as if they were chasing shadows in everything they did, all accuracy was missing. The changes came when the tactics moved and the players just ‘went for it’, unleashing the ‘X’ factor.

At that level, everyone is a pretty decent player in their own right. Players ability to catch and run and pass and kick is all there but trying to look to deeply onto a prescriptive plan can be more of a shackle than map. Players are locked up and can feel that they’re being stifled. In both of these games, players changed what they were doing but also just played with their hearts.

Things were going awfully so giving it a blast wasn’t likely to make things that much worse. Keep doing what you were doing and get stuffed or do something else and just see what happens. Importantly, go out and enjoy it.

Now this isn’t a call to bin all of the coaches and just have the teams turn up on the day and see what happens. Strategic analysis is vitally important to allow teams to expand how they play and understand how all of the individual parts of the systems fit together, but it is possible to over coach a side.

There needs to be just that tiny spark of magic mixed into everything because it’s just there that can make the impossible explode. Ideas which are ‘out there’ get ignored if they don’t fit into a paint by numbers way of doing things and all you end up with is end product being mainly the same. Can you imagine the pitch meeting for the film Sharknado? On paper, lunacy. In reality, lunacy but so popular that it spawned FIVE sequels!!

The details and planning of the world we inhabit are crucial but tying everything up too tightly can end up making everything flat. That little bit of freedom can give you everything and it calls back to the words of yet another legend of the game who passed away over the weekend. Barry John was nicknamed ‘The King’ when he played in a golden era of welsh rugby. The video of him playing showcases things which almost appear to be beyond what a human being should do. He was just an amazing player who seemed to have abilities that physics couldn’t keep up with, but he also played outside Gareth Edwards, who is widely regarded as being the greatest player ever to have played the game and when they first got together and discussed how they were going to play and what they needed to do, John cut to the core of the issue with his response, “You throw ’em, I’ll catch ’em.”

Simple but at the centre of what they were doing was just to get stuck in rather than planning every possible detail to the Nth degree. Barry John was yet another who lit the fires for people beyond what metrics could show and seeing one of the new young players on Saturday shedding a tear during his anthem was proof that magic can grab you in ways bigger than just a song.

Stay safe all.

ALWAYS THE UNDERDOG

Everyone who knows me will be fully aware that I’m more than a little excited for the start of this years Six Nations competition. Rugby is ‘my’ sport. I love cricket, keep an eye on the football and pretty much any sport I can get my hands on but rugby is number one. For as long as it mattered for me, the Six Nations, or Five Nations as it was before 2000, was a great chance to watch the best the northern hemisphere has to offer. I always followed Wales first and foremost but I’d never pass up the other games because my team wasn’t playing.

Since Italy were welcomed into the tournament in 2000, it’s meant that each game weekend now has three games to watch so I have a blast, but with expansion of the contenders came the very real possibility of the new boys always being the team that everyone else beats.

It happened much more than not over the years and it brought to the surface the very real sensation for everyone that Italy became peoples second favourite team. Game after game, year after year, Italy gave it their all and more often than not, lost. They were valiant competitors but there was just that little bit more ‘X’ factor for the opposition.

But in the very first match they played in the Six Nations, against Scotland, they won.

It was amazing.

I watched the game and as the clock ticked closer to the end with Italy in front, you couldn’t help but get swept up with the emotion of the underdog showing the bigger team what for.

So why do we gravitate to the underdog?

The underdog story is something which sits comfortably within a sports based narrative but conflict of any kind brings it up. We see that on paper, the result should only really ever be going one way but deep deep down for all of us, there’s that little flame that burns away, daring to hope, to wish that little guy will this day be victorious. David and Goliath shows that this idea isn’t something which is the sole property of current sports movies.

We want to see the little guy prevail because everything is set against them. We want to see them succeed because we ARE the little guy. Each and every one of us is the little guy in some situation and knowing that out there is a tale where, even against the terrible obstacles which may line up before us, we can win, means that we keep trying. The underdog story tells us that we know that multi-millionaire sports team will crush the local pub team because every metric that you could line up to compare, they’re just better, but on that one very special day, where the stars align and the prayers are answered, the minnow will take down the giant.

We romanticize the idea of the plucky underdog but at the heart of all of the fans who grip on to all that grown up cynicism, we all keep that tiny flame of hope safe. It may be locked up behind bars of iron and buried beneath mountains of our own rational thinking, but reaching out to the underdog and fanning that flame of hope should be looked upon as the greatest call to magic that any of us could make.

Maidstone United, a football team from the town I grew up in, were huge underdogs at the weekend just gone but they still won against a team 98 places above them in the leagues. On paper, they had no chance, but they still did it and everyone who was neutral loved them for it.

Long may we all hold tight to that most magical hope that the underdog is never truly down for the count.

Stay safe all.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVOUITE DINOSAUR?

I went for a walk on the beach a few days ago. It was cold but it was a bright, sunny day and I had the cobwebs well and truly blown away by being out and about. I hadn’t been planning on the jaunt but I found myself outside and just casually wandering along the sea front, and while I did, I just continued looking about at all of the things that were going on around me. There were dogs running about, a few I even got to meet, and loads of others doing the same as I was, just getting some fresh air. It was all very ‘usual’. As I carried on, I watched on as all of the dogs were tearing around after the different balls that had been thrown and while they all went out to meet all of the other dogs doing the same, it made me wonder about that sheer wonder of what was happening. Now it’s easy to say that everyone walking along on that beach was enjoying their time but watching those dogs made it all too clear that they were REALLY enjoying it. They were running all over the shop, exploring through the rocks and investigating any and all things they encountered along the way. Shells, seaweed, stones, litter, it didn’t matter, they wanted to investigate. So I took a leaf out of their book. I jumped over a few of the rocks which were part of the sea defences and shouted ‘PARKOUR’ for the full effect. I looked like a plonker but I didn’t care. I remembered what it was like as a kid going to the beach and just going nuts over what was there so did it a little again. I collected shells which looked interesting, my wife found a couple of really awesome sticks, and all in all, we looked at ‘stuff’ in a much more child-like way to embrace the usual for the wonders that they are. Every adult out there, even the really strict and fierce ones, was once a child with a burning wonder in their hearts. Each and every one of us has at one point, seen a wooded area next to a local road, which adult us knows is just there to act as a buffer zone between the road and the houses beyond, and imagined all manner of adventures just waiting to be found. We’ve played games of make believe and just let ourselves fly, regardless of the realities of where we find ourselves, and had a blast doing it. But then we grow up. We have to learn all of the important things to fit into the world at large and so very many of us put our wonder down to make room for other things. Sure, we may pick it up occasionally when we go on holiday and see an amazing view, but in the main, that bag of wonder is replaced with more and more knowledge. We know where shells come from. We know that the rocks were there to serve a purpose of coastal defence. We know that sticks are parts of plants. we know all of these things at the expense of all those other things around them. I think we all have to gather up as much knowledge as possible to be able to go about what we do every day but my walk on the beach reminded me again of the absolute wonder that the world around us truly has. Those shells were amazing. Just marvelling at the shapes and colours of those things goes far beyond just understanding the facts of what they are. It’s magical to let yourself see beyond just the lines of fact and see the wonder of the world around us. Jumping on the rocks was an amazingly freeing act and done just for the hell of it goes beyond being just the physical activity and can represent our chance to fly just a little. Everyone out there, just try and keep that spark of wonder in mind when we see the world. Who knows what you might see. Stay safe all.

THE EASIER THE BETTER

How many stories have you encountered which have a narrative which has more twists and turns than you’d ever think possible?

Whodunnits which writhe like a nest of snakes with so many layers and choices can very often confuse in an attempt to misdirect and all you end up with is disappointment.

In stories, as in life, I think the trick is not to complicate things unnecessarily.

A character goal, when finally finished in the crucible, tends to be much smaller and more straightforward than first shown and I think we could all do with remembering that on the day to day activities we enjoy.

So I raise a glass to keeping things simple.

Stay safe all.

THE RESTART

A feeling of absolute untetheredness during the post Christmas period was discussed last time out but my God, it doesn’t half leave a hangover.

We all lament the complete loss of form that grips us over the festive period and wish for the return of some kind of order, but then the new year settles in and we have to get back into that order.

That’s when we get clobbered again.

It feels like crawling out of a black hole trying to make our way back to what was before, but those ordered rules we were missing seen so far away. The world is quickly filled with sharp edges where there’d been floaty softness and everything we do just feels uncomfortable.

Making the change from one to the other is a struggle but it’s got to be done.

 Just remember, we’re all in the same boat.

And all that’s before we consider flu etc.

Pass me the cough medicine, I feel like poop.

Happy New Year 2024

Let’s all have the best year we possibly can and make sure to let your love of stories really take flight.

Have a good one everyone.