Untapped Potentials

(Of me, of you, of our characters)

I am currently in a world, through my words, that is both completely familiar, yet completely alien. Blackpool. My home town, the town that is now just along the coast from me, yet for many years was miles away, physically and emotionally. I have been brought back here through a novella I am writing, and my characters seem to be teaching me many things. The biggest of which is that for so many people, their potential is never reached, their dream never achieved. And that there is untapped potential in everyone.

Blackpool, a lot of the time

I am writing a father and son, something very new for me, and I am playing around with form. It is very different to anything I have ever attempted to write before (and yes, a little scary). There is also a deadline for this project, and a set of eyes waiting to read it. I have my trusted plan, my outline, the overall journey of the story and the ending I will give to these two broken men. But in-between, I am allowing their truths to come from them. They are a frustrated pair, tied to a place that seems to be dying around them.

And so, through them I am seeing so many people I recognise. The ones who gave up on their dream or their passion because they were told it would go nowhere. The ones where the reality of life, and the need to earn money, got in the way. The ones who either couldn’t find the confidence or didn’t know the routes that were available. The ones who stopped when children came along and that small part of them was pushed aside and simply forgotten.

I see myself in them. Like all writers, I wanted to write as a teenager. I DID write as a teenager, on an electric typewriter. But ‘author’ wasn’t a career, and when I said I wanted to be a journalist, I was laughed at and told I was far too quiet for that. I wanted to write features, not thrust a microphone into an important person’s face and try to get a scoop. My careers advisor did not know me at all. But still, I pushed the idea aside and somehow ended up doing a science degree (which I loved) and then fluked my way into a ‘career’ working with disadvantaged children and young adults. The sector was soul-sucking, and although I rose through various ranks to management level, the Government-funded contracts were so target-driven, I soon learned that the young people I was trying to help mattered very little. I shifted into the much more caring charity sector before my own children arrived, and with them a second chance at my original dream - author.

What is their story?

I wonder how many people have the same story as me, and how our characters might also be tainted and saddened by the lost opportunities, by never being allowed or able to do what they truly felt they were meant to do? For my Blackpool characters, I see a real regret in them. I see generations repeating the same behaviours of those who went before them, of resentment on both sides, envy, and of disappointment that patterns are repeating yet they are unable to articulate it.

These untapped potentials in our characters are also untapped potentials for us writers and our readers. They offer mines for us to dig, to excavate, because a lost dream in a character has repercussions. And the dreams don’t have to be big, they don’t have to have wanted to win a Nobel Prize; they can be small, yet meaningful, and the reality of not achieving and not reaching can lead to huge internal shifts in our characters. We talk a lot about our characters ‘wants’, but what if they have never got what they wanted? How does that affect them into adulthood and beyond, and how does it affect those around them? It’s off the page, it’s in their backstory, but it will still be a part of them, now. Shaping their outlook,

And as for dreams? I’m not sure about the whole fairytale dreams coming true trope. Because the truth is, that is rarely a reality, especially not from the rosy versions we create in our own heads. But dreams and aspirations might present themselves in different ways, and we can let our characters, and ourselves, grab onto those opportunities with both hands! And this olive branch of a dream, of tapping into that untapped potential, can show a whole new side of the characters we are creating.

Happy writing!