Treating Characters with Dignity (or not)

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was watching the anime Bleach.  This post is not about the show; it's just that it made me think about the idea of treating characters with dignity—or not treating them with dignity.  Anime makes this concept easy to see (if your character makes a crazy silly cartoon face because they’re upset, you’re not treating them with dignity), but the concept holds true throughout all stories.

I’ll try to break it down a bit.

Treating a character with dignity means never making fun of him or inviting your reader to laugh at him.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that you aren’t changing what the characters are doing or feeling, only how you are presenting their actions and thoughts.  It’s irrelevant whether your character is dignified or not.  It’s entirely possible to treat an undignified character with dignity or vice versa.  Indeed, in real life, treating yourself with dignity generally doesn’t mean being rigid and proper all the time—it means being okay with looking stupid. 

Think about acting.  If an actor is embarrassed and acting like he thinks he looks ridiculous, then he will look ridiculous.  If he instead totally gets into his role, he’ll look awesome—even if his acting isn’t all that great.  In real life, if you get up to give a speech and rub your hands awkwardly and say, “Ah, this is awkward; I haven’t prepared” you’ll look pathetic.  If you get up and give the crowd a big cheesy grin and announce that you haven’t prepared, you’ll look great.

In stories, a villain who tries to make the beautiful princess marry him can certainly look ridiculous, pathetic, and laughable—or he can look tragic, pitiable, and romantic (a la Phantom of the Opera).  Likewise, if the villain loses his temper and starts screaming threats, the author can make him look silly or she can make him look terrifying, but—and note this—she cannot do both simultaneously.

Denying a villain dignity will rob him of his power to scare the reader.

Which may be what you want.  Indeed, this is a very powerful tool in real life: if you can make your opponent look ridiculous, then 99% of the time, you have won the psychological battle—and the rest follows quickly.

For some stories, a villain treated without dignity for laughs is great fun, but I’ve also seen it done in a way that totally undermined the story simply because the author didn't understand.  I once edited a book in which the protagonist was strong and perfect and the villain was weak and cowardly.  I tried to explain to the author that this made me want to root for the villain, because the villain was the underdog and I couldn't identify with the protagonist . . . and the author responded by making the villain even more weak and cowardly and thus even more of an underdog.  By treating his villain without dignity and asking the reader to laugh at  how weak he was (and doing the opposite with his hero), what author accomplished was that he evoked sympathy for the villain and got the reader to side with the villain.

Sigh.  But on the plus side, this leads us to my next point:

Treating a character with dignity creates a barrier between character and reader; treating a character without dignity brings character and reader closer together.

Have you ever tried to be close buddies with someone who’s distant and aloof?  Do you even want to be friends with such people?  Aloofness creates a do-not-mess-with-me barrier.  (This may or may not be intentional; the trick, in books and real life, is to recognize what you’re doing and use it appropriately.)  I’ve used proper politeness in real life as a means of defense—and of forcing a dangerous party to act properly toward me.  It doesn’t always work, but I believe it has several times kept me safe. Now, in a story, it's whether you treat the character with dignity (not whether the character is dignified) that creates the barrier.  So ask yourself: Do I want to create a barrier?

It depends on your aim.  I’d say that 99.99% of the time, you do not want to create a barrier around your protagonist, because you want your reader to identify with him.  But beyond that, it depends on what you’re aiming for with each character.

Which characters should you treat with dignity?  It’s up to you.  Just make sure you’re making the choice purposefully and that you know the consequences of it.

Stop Cheating Your Reader

As a writer, reader, and editor, I believe very strongly in not cheating.  This can take several forms, but what it comes down to is this:

Cheating means taking the easy way out instead of giving the reader satisfaction.

Every writer has things they’re good at writing and things they’re bad at—and every writer has things that come easily and things that are hard.  To give an extreme example: I once edited an action thriller novel . . . that had no action in it.  The entire thing was dialogue scenes about the action.  So in one scene, the characters would be talking about this terrifically difficult and dangerous heist they were going to pull, and in the next scene, they were talking about how, yes, the heist went off just fine.

Are you kidding me?  Where’s my heist?  You can’t dangle that in front of us and not show it!  That’s cheating!

But I get it: cheating is awfully tempting.  My guess is that that particular author found action sequences difficult to write, and so just wrote around them.  I don’t find action difficult to write—my struggles come with interpersonal-relationship-growth sequences.  They’re really, really tough for me, but they need to be done in order to achieve a satisfying story.  So I write them even though they're really hard for me.

But I didn’t actually write this post to talk about cheating by avoiding writing particular scenes but about cheat endings.  I once saw these called “weasel-y ways out,” and that’s a pretty good description.

Cheat endings are endings that use convenience to avoid consequences and to reset the circumstances to what they were at the beginning of the story.

Here are some common ones:

·       It was all a dream!

·       Then all the people not in-the-know lost their memories

·       Then the protagonist lost his memory and went back to life as usual

·       Once the bad guy was defeated, the protagonist lost his powers

With very, very few exceptions, these are horrible endings.  They’re vastly unsatisfying—and they’re generally completely unnecessary.  Why did it have to all be a dream?  Why couldn’t it have just been real?  Why couldn’t the entirety of New York have seen the aliens/magic and this spiked a new age?  Why couldn’t our protagonist have remained awesome and kept moving forward instead of regressing—thus completely undoing all the growth we spent the entire book on?

For a book to be satisfying, actions need to have consequences.

I specified earlier dream/lose memory/lose powers endings were cheating because they relied on author convenience.  If you’re writing a series, it’s really tough to have your whole world change, so you may come up with a convenient way to avoid this.  If your focus really, really isn’t on the change, then you might want to come up with a way around it—but:

Unless you fully integrate a reset ability in your universe (a la Men in Black), then resetting is cheating. 

If you’re wondering how this rant came about, it’s because I spent countless hours with a series, only for the protagonist to lose all his powers and get sent back to square one.  It was so frustrating.  It was a lazy way to get him a slightly different power set when he got his power back—but we’d already seen him gain power; we didn’t need to see it again.  Besides, the powers he'd had before were far from fully explored, and if he kept them, there would be some difficult consequences; so robbing him of his powers was a lazy way for the author to avoid dealing with the consequences of him having them.

To add insult to injury, the protagonist’s friends had just witnessed his immense powers for the first time—and we didn’t even get to see their reactions or what happened the next time he (sheepishly) came up to them.  What an amazing scene that would be!  Awkwardly explaining that, heh, yes, he was one of the most powerful people in the universe . . . funny how these things happen.

It would have been amazing to see that protagonist go forward, now that his powers were too great to be easily controlled.  It would have been incredible to see him interact with his friends after they saw him as he was.  And instead, he became a normal boy again, the end.

I just felt so . . . cheated.