Everyone's trying their best

Every now and then, you hear someone express something beautifully and you think, “Yes!”

Not only does the person express a thought you’ve had many times in a much better way than you ever could, but they make a connection you hadn’t thought of before.

Ok, enough suspense.

I was on my way to meet co-author Bree for the first time in person (Yay! - but that is a story for another post), in a café by the canal outside Paddington station. Going into town on the Hammersmith and City is a comfortable experience from Hammersmith - the journey is overground, the carriages are air-conditioned, and the environment is perfect for listening to a podcast.

I was listening to episode 139 of The London Writer’s Salon, featuring writer Steve Almond. Around minute 22, he said:

“Everybody's trying their hardest all the time. It may not seem like it, but everybody is trying their hardest all the time. And that's, to me, very beautiful and also a very tragic realisation. And trying in the sense of trying in every facet, or telling the truth, or doing their best to figure out how to act in the world.”

I totally agree.

I watch enough crime drama to know that nobody leads a life of crime for the fun of it - most people just find themselves in bad situations, and end up acting badly.

I also watch enough news to know that many people who fight corners we oppose, think that those are the right corners to fight for.

“Everyone is trying their best”

Steve Almond also talks about this in the context of writing fiction, and how it helps us understand our characters.

That’s why it’s so interesting to write villains, (not just of the muah -haw-haw-type, but also those people who make life difficult for others), they often don’t realise they’re causing any harm, or if they do, it usually comes from a need to put the world to rights.

Understanding villains is also one of the first rules of acting.

You can’t play the baddie as a baddie.

You have to play them straight.

You have to understand why they say what they say, and do what they do.

You can’t judge them or look down on them - au contraire, you have to fall in love with them.

For example, playing Richard III is great fun because he is evil, and it’s fun to have license to be evil.

But it can be even more fun to look for what leads someone to be evil, and let the audience decide what’s evil or not.

As an audience member, it can be more fun to watch Richard III being vulnerable, even playful. And finding the truth of his villainy is not “a comfortable place to go”*, in the words of Mark Rylance. Rylance talks about how Richard’s deformity, even though it wasn’t as prominent as Shakespeare described, would have affected not just his self-image, but might also have been accompanied by all sorts of superstitions about his birth, omens, etc. - a “sociopathic mind” in Rylance’s words. (*08.42 mins https://charlierose.com/collections/2/clip/17821)

Rylance also talks about how many actors try to make Richard III “more villainy than I would ever spend time around”. He prefers to give the character more charisma and sense of humour and “all the characteristics of a normal person - otherwise all the other characters have to act stupid” for the scenes to feel real.

I think that’s why I love acting - and reading, and watching TV.
It brings me closer to understanding why people do things I don’t approve of.
In all honesty, I used to watch The Wright Stuff many years ago, to listen to people calling in with outrageous opinions. Outrageous by my standards and values, of course.

That’s also why I like writing fiction, or nowadays, think about what I could be writing.

It brings me closer to trying to step into other people’s shoes, to find reasons of why we do things we shouldn’t do - and why one person’s shouldn't is another persons’s should.