Anything Fictional » Writing http://www.anythingfictional.com Because fiction is life with the dull bits left out Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:49:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Creating Empathy http://www.anythingfictional.com/2008/09/creating-empathy/ http://www.anythingfictional.com/2008/09/creating-empathy/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:04:07 +0000 Chris http://www.anythingfictional.com/?p=56 In fiction, empathy is incredibly important. If a reader is not able to empathise with your character – especially your main character – the will lose interest in the story. It seems like human nature that once you empathise with someone, you begin to care, as if what they are going through is what you are going through, and you want to see a positive outcome in the end.

Many writers just starting out are told that they need to make the reader empathise with the protagonist, but this can be a tricky business to do consciously. For me, my writing to date has been mostly about plot and story without a lot of conscious choices regarding characters. Some characters have happened to be empathetic, others not as much as they could or should have been. So I’m in a position now where I’m trying to consciously learn this skill.

If empathy is an intellectual understanding of the way someone is thinking and feeling – to be able to step into someone else’s proverbial shoes – your job as a writer is not to make the reader think and feel the way a character does, but to make the reader understand why.

The first step you must take as a writer you want any hope of creating empathy in the reader is to empathise with the character yourself.I has this experience recently of coming to relate to one of my own characters. This character is the villian, the baddie, the antagonist. To me, he’d always been a manipulative SOB, the puppetmaster making everyone dance on his strings. His primary motivation was to have control of everything. He was very two-dimensional, not a solid character at all.

But I’d been exploring his past because it was very important to the progression of the story and found that an action I’d always thought motivated by the desire to manipulate another person had in fact been done to keep a promise. All of a sudden, I could relate to him and even see that deep down, he was actually a decent person. This makes for a very interesting villain, the sort I’d want to read about myself.

So what was the change here? Why did looking at it this way change my view of the character? I believe it is because I found a positive intention behind the action. The character wants to keep his promise – a value that I can relate to. I can now see myself taking that same action in the same circumstances.

Maybe this is the trick to creating empathy: find the positive intention, the relatable quality of any motivation. This can be applied to almost any motivation – even a villain’s – and by delving into these actions we can get to the humanity beneath it.

And in the end, isn’t that what all good fiction is about…

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]]> In fiction, empathy is incredibly important. If a reader is not able to empathise with your character – especially your main character – the will lose interest in the story. It seems like human nature that once you empathise with someone, you begin to care, as if what they are going through is what you are going through, and you want to see a positive outcome in the end.

Many writers just starting out are told that they need to make the reader empathise with the protagonist, but this can be a tricky business to do consciously. For me, my writing to date has been mostly about plot and story without a lot of conscious choices regarding characters. Some characters have happened to be empathetic, others not as much as they could or should have been. So I’m in a position now where I’m trying to consciously learn this skill.

If empathy is an intellectual understanding of the way someone is thinking and feeling – to be able to step into someone else’s proverbial shoes – your job as a writer is not to make the reader think and feel the way a character does, but to make the reader understand why.

The first step you must take as a writer you want any hope of creating empathy in the reader is to empathise with the character yourself.I has this experience recently of coming to relate to one of my own characters. This character is the villian, the baddie, the antagonist. To me, he’d always been a manipulative SOB, the puppetmaster making everyone dance on his strings. His primary motivation was to have control of everything. He was very two-dimensional, not a solid character at all.

But I’d been exploring his past because it was very important to the progression of the story and found that an action I’d always thought motivated by the desire to manipulate another person had in fact been done to keep a promise. All of a sudden, I could relate to him and even see that deep down, he was actually a decent person. This makes for a very interesting villain, the sort I’d want to read about myself.

So what was the change here? Why did looking at it this way change my view of the character? I believe it is because I found a positive intention behind the action. The character wants to keep his promise – a value that I can relate to. I can now see myself taking that same action in the same circumstances.

Maybe this is the trick to creating empathy: find the positive intention, the relatable quality of any motivation. This can be applied to almost any motivation – even a villain’s – and by delving into these actions we can get to the humanity beneath it.

And in the end, isn’t that what all good fiction is about…

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