Other fictional characters, besides Atlas, who shrugged

When was the last time that you shrugged in real life, or were present when somebody else did? And was it before or after the most recent appearance of Halley's Comet?

Shrugging as a gesture has fallen into disuse, rightly so in my opinion. It is a glib embodiment of half-baked defeat that is, in and of itself, defeatist to the core; a method of using your entire upper body to communicate to other people in your vicinity that, not only are you an idiot, but that you are also shaking off any responsibility to mitigate your ignorance.

I have resorted to shrugging in the past and, in doing so, have caused irreparable damage to my immortal soul. Whether this wilful self-injury is sufficient to deny me access to the Kingdom of Heaven, after my death, only time will tell. At present, if I was given an option between expressing my helplessness either by shrugging or by punching a wall, I would bear the skinned knuckles and keep my dignity. I would also pay for any damage that I caused to the wall.

While shrugging has faded from the gestural lexicon of our face-to-face conversations, there remains a certain strain of makeweight fiction where it still persists. A writer, perhaps senses that some humanising break in a block of dialogue is required – that one of their characters needs to appear to be doing something in order to inject a semblance of activity into their prose. A similar principle exists in those better-conceived comics, where the panels in a dialogue-heavy page will show the conversationalists from different perspectives, allowing a sense of animation and context to permeate their discourse. The problem in the former example is that the writer in question has not been observant in their day-to-day life and/or has a poor understanding of human body language. They lazily grope around for the first off-the-peg descriptor within their reach. This often seems to be the shrug.

When focusing on characters, my style of prose naturally gravitates towards body language and the much-maligned adverb, because I am a visual writer. I like to dress the set. I sit down with a detailed mental image of the scene that I want to describe. I know how big a room will be, for example, and its orientation, and where all the furniture is, and how the characters are positioned in relation to each other along with their outward disposition and demeanour. Maybe that is a consequence of growing up with TV and its free-range cousin, the videogame.

In recent months, I have been dedicating half an hour every day to watching YouTube videos of people talking to each other, while I make detailed notes, not only on their gestures and shifting postures, but also on how these relate to what other people in the conversation are doing. Am I training to be a psychological profiler? No. I just feel a compulsion to write better characters who seem authentic, not only in their words, but also in their actions. This is particularly vital in the novel that I am currently writing which leans heavily on interpersonal relationships; a challenge for someone who, in the past, has fixated on ideas and concepts over and above human interactions.

What began as a means to an end has gradually shifted to an end in itself. The back and forth subtleties underlying our face-to-face conversations are fascinating; as though, through our hand gestures and nuanced movements, we are perpetually in the process of casting a succession of spells, weaving around ourselves protective wards and enchantments.

The comic writer, Garth Ennis, wrote, in one of his back-page editorials (I think that it might have been in an issue of 'Just A Pilgrim') that if you want your readers to lose all respect for a character, you should make their death shriek: “aeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” A similar principle applies to aeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii's more genteel literary cousin – the shrug; a gesture that needs to be allowed to fade from the fictional landscape, and only be deployed by writers under exceptional circumstances. I wish to be a part of this change. I hereby pledge that if any character in my publicly-available writing is described as shrugging, said character will have been modelled upon a real-life individual who has incurred my displeasure, and who I now wish to depict in a manner that makes them appear foolish. There exists an asinine subset of social media user, whose go-to response to a person expressing political opinions that are mildly different to their own, is to libel them as a Nazi or white supremacist. In kind, I will sap the foundation of my enemies by turning them into a character named 'Ian' and then making him shrug.

This is not an idle threat. Do not test me.