Activating ‘curious mode’

        Picture credit: IMDb

Recently, I saw a modern reworking of the Greek myth, Oedipus, with one of the leading parts played by Lesley Manville. She’s a fabulous actress, and I remembered a very different role she played in Mum, a 2016 TV sitcom.

If you haven’t seen Mum, it’s available on BBC iPlayer, but for those who prefer 'clean' viewing, please be aware the language is ripe and some topics of discussion equally so (the same goes for Oedipus!). However, if that’s okay and you enjoy dry observational humour with an insight into the human condition, it has much to offer. If you watch all the episodes, it’s a great example of character development any writer could learn from.

When we meet Mum, she’s a recently widowed fifty-nine-year-old, surrounded by friends and family, most of whom are oblivious to her needs or feelings. Several of the cast are irritatingly self-obsessed and rather hard to like. Mum could hardly be blamed if she washed her hands of the lot of them. However, as time goes on, the scriptwriter opens a window, allowing us a glimpse of their own situations, fears and vulnerabilities, so by the end of the series, our perspective may have changed. Mum, amid her own loss and grief, stoically tolerates them just by listening patiently and accepting them for who they are. I like her favourite question - ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’

I’ve written here before about my role as a workplace mediator and how the keys to reaching good relationship outcomes (if not perfect) for everyone are listening to people and accepting them for who they are. One of my colleagues often says, ‘people just need a good listening to’ and he’s on to something. When the characters in mediation first present themselves, stressed, discontent and full of angst, they often focus solely on the unacceptable behaviour of the other person, and this is understandable. It’s hard to feel empathy for someone you’re in dispute with, someone you don’t like or, as is increasingly the case, a colleague you barely know – one of the unintended consequences of remote working.

As a mediator, I’ve discovered the power of being curious about what lies behind human behaviour and now I try (not always successfully) to activate my ‘curious mode’ whenever someone behaves in a way that ruffles my feathers. Like Mum, we can curiously wonder what’s going on for them right now, what traumas they’ve gone through, what unhappiness they are carrying, or what it might be about their life we know little or nothing of. We might also try to remind ourselves it’s just as likely we’re the one annoying them!

As a novice fiction writer, I’m equally curious about what’s going on with my characters. If I’ve chosen to cast someone as constantly angry, defensive or prickly, for example, why might they be that way? Is it enough to simply ‘let it be so’ and allow the reader to derive their own view, or do I need to reveal more about them to prevent them from being misunderstood or one-dimensional? Recently, I worked with a client to explore how disclosing more about past traumas to their colleague may help them be understood and, sure enough, the revelations they were brave enough to make have transformed how they’re seen. It took some guts to drop the mask, to bring some secrets into the light, but boy, it was worth it. Secrets are heavy to lug around. Secrecy and shame, so often partners in crime, hate the light of exposure.

So, I’m curious... to all the fiction writers out there... what lays behind your character’s masks? What happened to them before they ever appeared in your plot? What don’t your readers know about them? How might their perspective of them change by some carefully chosen revelations?