The Rogue Gallery
My own most recent experience, with a just-finished novel only now beginning to make its rounds to beta readers and agent and such, illustrates an interesting point.
Readers like rogues.
Think about a more famous situation than my own story, right now. Think Star Wars. (No, the ORIGINAL Star Wars, not the latter three abominations.) They had their protagonist all nicely set up – there he was, a pent-up wannabe hero-boy trapped on a nowhere-world just waiting for a chance to show his mettle in a situation where it matters. And lo, he is given the chance – off Luke Skywalker goes, to seek his glory and to get his girl.
But oh. Wait. Enter Han Solo, stage left. And people kind of grin and sit up and raise their eyebrows, and we’re off. In that deathless scene where they rescue the Princess from the prison cell even she is instantly and immediately sarcastic to Luke who kind of stutters and stammers and yanks off his stolen startrooper’s helmet and kind of babbles about being there to rescue her. Yes, Solo stammers and babbles too – but he ends HIS stint at it by simply blowing up the com link. Enough talking. Let’s DO.
Off goes Luke, seeking Jedi-ness, seeking wisdom, seeking Yoda, doing yoga on a steamy jungle world and getting metaphysical revelations.Solo?… goes off on adventures. The adventures get him into trouble. And yet even when Leia and Luke and the cavalry come to rescue him from Jabba’s Han Solo is still the man of the hour and everyone else is just dancing to his tune.
He’s a rogue. Just keeping this genre – so’s Captain Mal in Firefly. So’s Captain Kirk, really (when was the last time he played by the rules?) Inigo Montoya. Captain Jack from Torchwood, anyone? For that matte, Doctor Who? Paul Atreides?
As the saying goes, nice guys finish last. They seem to be difficult to write believable stories about, stories which show them in the best possible light without putting the reader to sleep. It seems we aren’t – at least when it comes to fiction – interested in reading hagiographies; we like a little bit of spice to our protagonist, to know that our lead character is capable of doing something underhand if it needs to be done while staying BASICALLY honourable and upright.Don’t get me wrong, there ARE villains, and there are places for villains, and we loathe a properly moulded villain as we should – and there are signs and portents telling us who the truly BAD people are in any given tale so that we can respond to them in proper vise. But there are people for whom we root, instinctively, passionately, BECAUSE they have a Past, or have a Secret, or have a Flaw. The Rogue. The Bad Boy. The one that comes in dressed in black leathers riding a Harley and waits, silently, while the heroine looks from him to the wet-blanket hero who’s standing there wearing a white had and whining about how he deserves her undying devotion and then turns her back on the white-hat and runs, not walks, to the promise of danger and excitement and adventure and not-quite-safety that the guy on the black bike represents.
Shifting into a slightly different genre… It’s no accident that Elizabeth Bennett falls for Darcy. It’s no accident that Jane Eyre runs to Rochester. It’s far from an accident that Cathy can’t let go of Heathcliff. It’s no accident that in so many romance novels the hero is less than holier-than-thou – at the very least until he meets and is tamed by our heroine’s devotion and goodness – the surfeit of goodness that she carries, because it has to suffice for BOTH of them during the happily ever after which will ensue after the consummation of the romance. But dammit, that’s what keeps it INTERESTING – which romantic heroine worth her salt wants to spend the rest of her days with someone who is ALREADY all nice and reformed? What’s the challenge in that?
When I was creating my own “bad boy” character, I was writing about a young man in his late teens who has been damaged by a number of things that happened during his formative years. He was uprooted from his original home and his family, he is failing at something that the rest of his family consistently succeeds at, he is racked with guilt over his perceived role in his older sister’s death, and when he takes matters into his own hands and tries to put things right everything goes spectacularly wrong for him… and yet so far every beta reader who has picked up this story has a consistent favourite character, and it’s this guy. He’s a rogue, you see, and rogues (especially those whose intentions are basically okay-to-good) attract us all because there is some part of us all that thinks that we, as readers or viewers of a story told in a book or seen on a screen, have the actual power to wade in and rescue these characters from themselves somehow. And failing that, their adventures, even if filled with heroic and catastrophic failures, are that much more EPIC, more fascinating, than the good boy’s stepping up all bright eyed and bushy tailed to receive his little gold star from his teacher for a well-done piece of homework.
In a well-told story, characters change. With a protagonist who is poisonously good to begin with, that change cannot go anywhere at all that is remotely in the right direction – that kind of protag cannot get GOODER than he (or she) already is. With a rogue whose heart is in the right place… well, there is always the possibility that the call of the Dark Side will prove too strong, of course, but the far more tantalizing possibility is that things will go the other way, and we root for that… and in the meantime, we enjoy the hell out of the journey. With a rogue possessed of charm and wit and the occasional leavening stab of bright-eyed malice, life is never dull.
There is a whiff of something that smells like Redemption, and we are suckers for Redemption. Even the most cynical of us lapse now and then and believe in a smidgin of it. It’s hardwired into us. The basic underlying plot of any tale is the road to redemption, someone’s redemption. It makes us feel better to see it, to sense it, to be a part of it. Rogues have more fun – always assuming, of course, that they won’t slide all the way into the pure evil on the far side.
Which book are you reading RIGHT NOW? Does it have a rogue in it?…
