Meme Month has come and gone; taking a lesson from those
brief depictions of authorial insanity (while acknowledging that, yes, another
busy college semester has started for me), I’ll do my best to keep this one
down to a three-minute reflection. In that time, I will do my best to convince
you that, as an author, you should hate Alessia Cara’s song “Scars to Your
Beautiful”.
If you’re a ravenous fan of that recent pop
contribution, too bad.
If, somehow, you ARE Alessia Cara and have wandered onto
my humble author blog…my apologies, but today’s just not your day. If it helps,
I do enjoy your song “Stay” no matter HOW many times the local DJs decide to
play it.
The song “Scars to Your Beautiful”, I will admit, has an
upbeat rhythm that no doubt launched it to success. I appreciate the fact that
it has less of a droning quality than, say, “Stay” by Rihanna, a song that
should be officially registered as an auditory tranquilizer and is therefore
unfit for driving radio. However, Alessia’s lyrics continue to goad me into an
arguing match with my car’s stereo, and here I would like to explain why. The
anthem proclaims:
…you should know you’re beautiful just the way you are,
And you don’t have to change a thing, the world can
change its heart
No scars to your beautiful…
On one hand, this makes no sense on a logical plane. YOU
don’t have to change—the REST of the world can do that instead…a world that’s also made up of a bunch of people,
listening to that song…so unless this song was meant for one, specific, unnamed
person, it’s all very self-contradictory. How far we have come from Michael
Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”.
Secondly, and most importantly, while this sounds like a
great song for the vast population of people with self-esteem issues (and I
check into that community every once in a while myself), I argue that this song
does people more harm than good—not only because of the aforementioned logical
issues. Simply put, this song flies in the face of one of writing’s most meaningful
qualities: a story’s Character Development.
This quality is essential if you want a reader to
connect to a book. Some characters don’t change, that is true—but when that
happens, they either become the bumbling comic relief or part of an overall
comedy plot. Who knows? Maybe Alessia was subtly urging us all to become an
Adam Sandler film. But what if the character is not comedic? Then that might
mean you have a too-perfect person in the middle of your story—and those are far more unrealistic. Therefore, if you
want readers to connect with your written world as seen through the eyes of the
protagonist, the characters needs to change. There need to be some scars moving
them towards their beautiful. Sorry
again, pop music fans.
As a writer, though, you are not starved for ways to
shape your MC’s development.
(Let’s see…one minute left.)
I’ll make it quick.
As your character changes, the causes of his development
will obviously come from either internal or external forces; from the inside or
the outside. Balance is required between the two—if the MC is only affected by the outside, he becomes
passive. Nobody wants to watch a helpless twig float downstream. Beating your
character into submission by using the world you built around him sounds like a
tale of gradual slavery, not realization and recovery. That realization is the necessary
internal force; something has to come from your character’s heart and mind to
develop him into a different person.
In conclusion (ten seconds!), how you balance those
forces is up to you. But forget Alessia Cara—if you want a beautiful character
and a gorgeous story, there have got to be some growth. Some scars. I’m outta
here.