Writing Empathy Series Part Two: Empathy For Your CHARACTER
WRITING EMPATHY SERIES: PART TWO
Read part one HERE
Empathy for your CHARACTER
I have a bunch of best friends. Evangeline, Lyra, Mac, Calliope, Fauna. They happen to be protagonists in my novels. I love them! They’re full of life and loss, like most of us. And, like the real people in my life, I want to protect them, hide them away from harm, so the world doesn’t beat them down.
Only I can’t.
Because I’m the one bringing the world down on them!
It’s the paradox of writing fiction; we love our characters but we make their lives miserable. We are the ones who upend their lives and make them suffer. We have to. Our stories would be boring if we didn’t.
But how is that showing empathy to our characters? Why do we even have to be cruel to our characters in the first place?
Because life can be cruel to us. Our characters become avatars for our readers; the audience of my YA fantasy Evangeline’s Heaven may never have angel wings, but, like Evangeline who learns the truth about her beloved father, they may have had conflict with their parents.
Which brings us to another paradox of writing fiction. Yes, we’re the ones who destroy our characters’ lives, but we’re also the ones who show them the greatest amount of empathy.
As writers, our job is to ensure our readers feel what our characters feel. To do that, we need to get inside their head. We need to understand what they’re thinking and why. We need to explain not just how they solved their problems (assuming they do) but also their thought process leading up to their decisions.
It’s the difference between “showing vs. telling”, that age-old writing adage that seems spectacularly vague and at the same time fundamentally essential. I used to think I understood the difference. I thought “telling” was simply explaining to the reader how the character felt. “Mom was angry when her son Luke came home late, long after curfew.” And I knew enough not to “tell”. I’d show my readers instead. “Mom crossed her arm and tapped her foot, glowering when her son Luke snuck in the back door two hours after curfew.”
It turns out this isn’t really “showing”. Not enough, anyway, because there’s no empathy for Mom. “Showing” is getting inside Mom’s head, to learn why and how she’s so upset with her son Luke. “Showing” is the ability to understand and share the emotions of another. “Showing” is empathy for our characters. “Mom dug her nails into her palms hard enough to draw blood. It’s what she could see behind her eyes, blood, blood and more blood. Her husband’s blood, covering the road after the crash. Not accident. Car crashes aren’t accidents. Drinking too much and getting behind the wheel is not a mistake. Not when it kills a stranger. Not when a wife is waiting up for that stranger, her husband, a husband who would never return. And now she’s waiting again for her teenage son. She knows he’s probably just late, got caught up with his friends, but damn it! Didn’t he understand what this waiting did to her? Couldn’t he see what his irresponsibility was costing her?”
Can you feel Mom’s anguish now? Can you understand why she’s so angry with her son?
That’s the kind of empathy we want for our characters—for them to feel seen.
So that our readers, too, can feel seen.
That is, after all, why we write, isn’t it?
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Jen Braaksma is a writer and book coach with a decade of experience as a journalist and nearly two as a high school English and writing teacher. Her first book, Evangeline’s Heaven, launched August 30, 2022 from SparkPress.
Evangeline’s Heaven
War is ravaging the Seven Heavens. Lucifer and his Commoner supporters, the lowest class of angels, are rebelling against God’s plan to exile them to the new Earth. When Lucifer departs on a desperate war mission, he leaves his daughter, Evangeline, to defend their home in First Heaven. Fiercely loyal and trained to fight, Evangeline stands ready to do her father’s bidding.
But things change when Evangeline overhears the archangel Gabriel forming a plan to destroy Lucifer—because, as he tells his son, Michael, he believes Lucifer’s plan is to find the Key to the Kingdom and claim the power of God to control all the Heavens for eternity. Refusing to believe her father capable of such treachery, Evangeline sets off to alert her father.
As she battles through the Heavens, however, Evangeline is shocked to discover that what she believed she knew about her father might not be true after all. For the first time in her life, she begins to question whether or not her father’s motives are pure. With the fate of the Heavens hanging in the balance, she must decide who she’s going to be: her father’s daughter, or her own person.
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