Scars Towards Beautiful

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.