Can I tell you a story?

Once upon a time, there was a young man who was a habitual thief. Even though his family was perfectly capable of providing for him, and even though he was perfectly capable of working to support himself, he stole everything he owned and stole from anyone he could. He even subjugated innocent animals to make them steal for him.

In the same kingdom, there was a beautiful princess. Rich, powerful, handsome, kind men traveled from all over the world at the mere hope of winning her hand. Her doting father gave her everything she could ever want, and all he asked was that she marry, so that he could rest assured that she would be taken care of when he was gone. (Well, okay, he also would have liked to play with his grandkids before he went, too.) But the princess spurned and humiliated every suitor that came her way and simply refused to marry.

I know exactly what you’re thinking—you can’t wait for these two to get together for their happily ever after, huh? (Well, you have to admit, this does sound like it could be a prequel to The Great Gatsby, and then they could retreat into their money or their power or whatever it was that kept them together. . . . Anyway.)

But I’ll bet that you know and love a story with highly similar characters. This princess and this *ahem* street rat got a few new attributes in this retelling to make them a little less sympathetic. But in the hands of masterful character builders, by the time you know all the characters’ names, you’re rooting for them to find one another and fall in love.

How do we make these wretched people likeable? Here’s how it was done in the story I drew this from:

• Start off with a framing story to set up how important the hero is, how legendary he is, and hint that great things will happen to this “diamond in the rough.”
• He steals out of necessity—he’s an orphan, and he has to steal to eat.
• He is persecuted—the city’s guards catch him stealing quite regularly and chase him through the streets.
• He is smart and charming, and evades the guards through trickery.
• After working hard to get away with a single loaf of bread (and sharing with his animal sidekick), when he sees two hungry orphans he gives them his whole meal.
• A rich, haughty guy tries to tell our hero off completely without justification, and the crowd laughs. But our hero will have none of that and throws haughty guy’s words back in his face.
• But rich, haughty guy gets the last word—he says to our hero, “You are a worthless street rat. You were born a street rat, you’ll die a street rat, and only your fleas will mourn you.” Then the palace doors slam shut, making sure our hero can’t retort and reinforcing just how destitute he is—and in his heart of hearts, we can see he worried that rich, haughty guy is right. (Very like Scarlett.)

And that’s the first seven or eight minutes (and I didn’t even mention how he saved the orphans’ lives). The heroine, of course, wants to marry for love, and all her suitors are only interested in power and money. Her father could easily be cast as a bad guy—the evil tyrant forcing her to marry against her will—but in this treatment, he keeps those nice sentiments that we gave him before.

Okay, if you haven’t guessed it by now, I’ll just tell you: our hero is Aladdin from the Disney animated film. And yeah, it’s a kids’ film, so the characterization can be a little . . . well, strong. (How do you convince a five-year-old that the guy stealing on screen is actually the good guy?) But at the same time, it’s done fairly (or at least relatively) believably.

What do you think? What movies or books do you see good characterization of otherwise yucky characters?

Photo credit: money grabber—Steve Woods

As I mentioned before, I’ve been using the term “sympathetic characters” as shorthand for “characters whom the reader can identify with.” Creating reader identification is the ultimate goal here, because, as James N. Frey says in How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II, a character the reader can identify with is the key to creating the fictive dream—to immersing the reader into the world of the story (not to mention the mind of the character). And in that book, Frey outlines specific techniques to create that reader identification.

Sympathy

Frey goes so far as to say that you have to make the reader feel sorry for the character. I don’t know that I’d say that—but I would say that you have to let the reader see your character struggling. That essentially what Frey conveys—let the reader see the character as lonely, disadvantaged, put upon, sad, confused, unpopular, unfulfilled, imperiled, etc. As Frey concludes:

Sympathy is the doorway through which the reader gains emotional access to a story. Without sympathy, the reader has no emotional involvement in the story. (9-10)

And sympathy is a stepping stone to the next technique:

Identification

The next step is getting the reader to support the character’s goals and aspirations. While a character doesn’t have to be admirable, Frey stresses, the easiest way to get readers to support a character’s goal is to make sure their goal is noble.

And as a side note, it’s good to make that goal clear. It doesn’t have to be the character’s ultimate goal of the story right off the bat, either—but getting that in there pretty soon seldom hurts.

Once you’ve got the reader on board with your character’s noble goals, draw them in deeper with:

Empathy

Now we want to get the reader feeling what the character’s feeling—we want to instill in the reader the same emotions and responses. And, Frey says:

You do it by using the power of suggestion. You use sensuous and emotion-provoking details that suggest to the reader what it is like to be [the character] and to suffer what he is suffering. In other words, you create the story world in such a way that the readers can put themselves in the character’s place. . . .

You can win empathy for a character by detailing the sensuous details in the environment: the sights, sounds, pains, smells, and so on that the character is feeling‐the feelings that trigger his emotions. (19)

This doesn’t mean that every sad sack character should be trudging through the pouring rain (to the courthouse to try to win his freedom from a wrongful conviction)—though it might help. It does mean, however, that it helps for the character to take notice of his environs, and for them to mirror (or, possibly, contrast or mock) his internal emotional state.

But wait! There’s more! And the last step to fully transporting the reader is one we’ve mentioned here before:

Inner conflict

It’s not enough to have the characters struggling against some external forces (to gain sympathy)—we must also see them battling internally. This is the last step here because we need the readers to fully support the character’s goals and feel what they’re feeling before an internal moral debate will matter to the reader.

But once we have the readers feeling what the characters are feeling, then we can use internal conflict to fully transport the reader into the character’s head and the world of the story.

Frey’s book How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II was the one of the best resources I found for detailing the actual techniques of fostering reader’s sympathy for characters (and if this all seems very abstract here, check out the book—it’s replete with examples to make his points clearer, as well as his full arguments, which are much better stated than my summaries).

As I mentioned before, “Sympathy without Saintliness” by Alicia Rasley is another great resource—an online article with a few exercises at the end to help you increase your character’s sympathetic factor. Also, Julie Write posted an “unlovable character checklist” of factors you can use to get your readers onboard with even the most unlovable characters over on Writing on the Wall.

What do you think? How have you striven to create characters your readers can understand and cheer for?

Photo credits: Name tag—Sanja Gjenero; “Rain” (waterfall)—Flávio Takemoto

Sympathetic characters are absolutely vital to good (readable!) fiction. We’ve already mentioned that two things combined make characters sympathetic: strength and struggles.

But if a little strength and a little struggling are good things, then why not a lot of strength or a lot of struggles? Isn’t a super strong character going to be even more sympathetic than one who has some problems? Or maybe piling on the pain endlessly will make a character even more sympathetic?

Okay, you guessed it—just like a character who just gets more and more bad stuff piled on, a character who’s easily and confidently stronger than every challenge he faces isn’t really sympathetic.

Not by Strength Alone

A character who’s just a bundle of strengths has no struggles. He takes everything in stride, and everything continually works out for him. Here’s why:

Jeremy stared at the flames leaping from the third-story windows. There were three children unaccounted for. He took a deep breath and barreled through the open doorway, up the stairs, around corner after corner. The distant cries for help finally reached his ears over the cacophonous crackling. The children—trapped behind a locked door.

He threw his full weight against the door—it splintered at the massive force. He scooped up the children, two in his right, one his is left, and ran back down the stairs.

Jeremy gasped for a cool breath as he burst through the doorway to the outside. The headmistress held out her arms for a child and he held out one of them, smudged and bedraggled but alive. She clutched the boy to her chest, her eyes shining with admiration. “You’re our hero,” she said.

Is Jeremy strong? Brave? Courageous? Yeah, he’ll be getting a key to the city for his heroism. But interesting? Sympathetic? Kind of—but I think most people would like to think they’d be willing to help someone in danger. Everything works out really easily for Jeremy. He’s strong enough, he’s brave enough, and doggone it, people like him. I mean, um, he’s fast enough, and he never really doubts his ability to perform an extraordinary feat.

Ever notice how much dang kryptonite there seems to be floating around Superman’s story world? It’s almost more prevalent than air. Why do movie makers and screenwriters always dig up more of this stuff? Because watching a totally invincible man of steel defeat a dastardly enemy is entertaining for about four seconds. After that, it’s predictable—heck, it’s trite.

Try this one instead:

What was he doing in here? He was no hero. And now the heat and the smoke made it impossible to walk, to see, to think.

He crawled up the stairs, ducking his head down to the treads to catch a breath of oxygen as he groped along through the smoke. He could hear them screaming—for him, for anyone who could save them.

Could he?

Timothy reached out for the next riser, but found nothing—the second floor. With one hand on the wall, he made his way to the first door. The doorknob was cool. Safe to open. He pushed the door, but the child’s cries remained distant.

He clambered across the hall, gasping in the inch of hot airspace above the carpet. Another door—another cool doorknob. He opened the door and the screams for help grew louder. With a last breath of the burning oxygen, Timothy launched himself toward where the bed should be. He felt the sheets and seized a tiny wrist.

The child clung to his chest, Timothy supporting his weight with one hand whenever he could as they stumbled back to the stairs. But Timothy miscalculated—that first step was so much further than it seemed, but suddenly there was no floor beneath him and they tumbled, father and son, down the staircase.

Sprawled in a heap at the base of the staircase, he couldn’t take time to inventory their injuries. It couldn’t be that much further—when had their house gotten this big? Yanking the boy to his feet, Timothy willed his unwilling limbs to push back through the black and the heat, promising his protesting lungs fresh air if his body could just get them outside.

And then they were falling—falling? The front door—the front steps. The heat still blinded him, but suddenly his coughs were punctuated by gasps of cool night air as he landed on the pavement.

Do you feel the triumph now? Are you rooting for our hero to get through his difficulties? Note that Tim’s challenges aren’t as physically daunting as Jeremy’s were. Timothy doesn’t have to break down a door or carry out three orphans to impress us—he just has to overcome difficulties and insecurities.

Just like a character who’s all struggles is static, a character who’s all strength has nowhere to grow. We read to see that character growth—and that character growth is where we become sympathetic with those characters.

What do you think? Have you ever read (or written) a character that was just too strong? Or is there no such thing?

Image credit: Stefanie L.

I am absconding with Annette Lyon’s popular feature, Word Nerd Wednesday! Mwahaha! And to totally misappropriate it, I’m posting on a Friday!

I think you now understand how I write from my villains’ POVs.And speaking of characters, and keeping with our theme this month, I wanted to focus on two specific words that many people use interchangeably: sympathy and empathy. I realized that, while I sense a difference, I can’t really say for certain what it is. So I turned to some dictionaries.

Sympathy
From Merriam-Webster: a “relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other,” “mutual or parallel susceptibility.” Also, the “inclination to think or feel alike.” The American Heritage Dictionary, via Answers.com, agrees: “A relationship or an affinity between people or things in which whatever affects one correspondingly affects the other.”

Empathy
From Merriam-Webster again: the primary definition is “the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.” The other meaning is “the action of understanding . . . and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” The American Heritage definitions reverse the order: “Identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives” and “The attribution of one’s own feelings to an object.”

What’s the difference?
So let’s apply this to our characters. . . . Sympathy is an affinity between the character and the reader—when something happens to the character, the reader feels it. Or, to cut and paste one of the definitions again, it’s “the [readers'] act or power of sharing the feelings” of our characters.

Empathy, on the other hand, is the reader identifying with and understanding the character’s experiences and feelings, possibly to the level of vicariously experiencing them. Which, oddly enough, sounds very much like the same thing. However, Roget’s Thesaurus (via Thesaurus.com) gives an interesting distinction:

sympathy means the stimulation in a person of feelings that are similar in kind to those that affect another person; empathy means a mental or affective projection into the feelings or state of mind of another person

At the same time, it lists sympathy as a synonym for empathy and vice versa. So what is the difference? Let’s dig deeper: get out your etymology gear.

(Um, guys, what’s with the bee suits and the bug jars? I said etymology, not entomology. . . .)

Etymology
Sympathy and empathy aren’t just extremely similar concepts; they’re very similar words with similar roots. (This is a shout out to the great state of North Carolina, which required me to learn word roots my senior year of high school.)

• em– is a Greek prefix that’s found in words like instill, imbue, endow and embed. As you can see from those examples, they all mean “in” in some way—to put in, to spread in, to place in, etc.
• sym– is a Greek prefix found in words like symphony, symmetry, synesthesia and synecdoche (um . . . don’t worry about the definitions on those two ). Those examples aren’t the most transparent, but it means “with,” or “together.”
• pathos is a Greek word meaning feelings—or suffering.

So empathy would be instilling the character’s suffering in the reader, while sympathy would be making the reader suffer with the character. Still sounds pretty similar, doesn’t it?

So, really, what’s the difference?
The bottom line: there really isn’t that big a difference between the definitions of empathy and sympathy. ‘Round these parts, I’ve used “sympathy” to denote the ultimate goal of “reader identification”—inducing the reader to feel what the character feels, and to understand those feelings deeply. “Empathy,” in this paradigm, would be one technique used to instill those feelings.

So happy Word Nerd Wednesday. On Friday. And here, instead of Annette’s blog. (And no, actually, I didn’t ask Annette’s permission. But now I ask her forgiveness. *bats eyelashes* Please? I did it as a favor when you said you were so busy you didn’t post WNW this week. And while this is no Ellis Island mythbusting, I hope that this is an acceptable offering.)

What do you think—is this a distinction without a difference? Or are their nuances in the commonly accepted connotations of “sympathy” and “empathy” that dictionaries fail to capture?

Photo by Steve Woods

One of the first techniques we master in creating sympathetic characters is knowing that characters have to have problems. And they have to be major problems—something that they’ll really struggle with, things that appear insurmountable.

The temptation, then, can be to take that to the extreme. If some suffering makes our characters sympathetic, doesn’t a lot of suffering make them even more sympathetic?

Not always. Sometimes, as they say, more is just more.

One of the ways we try to show characters suffering to help build sympathy is through their backstory. We show them growing up, or use flashbacks and memories to show the injustices they’ve suffered. His father was always at work, his mother denied him jelly on his peanut butter sandwiches, his first girlfriend dumped him for a jerk, his first wife cheated on him, his boss doesn’t recognize his work, even his dog doesn’t appreciate him.

But this simply isn’t enough. In How to Write a Damn Good Novel, James N. Frey puts it strongly:

A character can be fully-rounded yet be too passive, too mamby-pamby. Characters who can’t act in the face of their dilemmas, who run away from conflict who retreat and suffer without struggling, are not useful to you [as a writer]. They are static, and most of them should die an untimely death before they ever appear in the pages of your novel and ruin everything. (6)

“A passive victim doesn’t struggle– just suffers,” as Alicia Rasley puts it. “Defeat isn’t sympathetic. It’s pathetic. . . . While we want to sympathize with the characters, we don’t want them to be victims so battered by past events that they don’t actually live in the present.”

So it’s not really just that our characters struggle—with past or present events. What really matters is how the characters react. They’re not indifferent to their struggles—they definitely need to feel the pain. But they’re also not self-pitying or whining about them—or, worst of all, passively dwelling on and submitting to them and even more injustice for no apparent reason. As Frey puts it:

Whenever a reader experiences profound empathy with a character, it is because the character is in the throes of intense inner conflict. A character may be in the most pathetic straits in the history of literature, but if he has no inner conflict, the only emotional response the writer can expect from the reader is pity. (36-37)

And pity is not our goal! Our characters have to show that inner strength that we’ve admired from the first. They have to be able to lift their heads after the wickedest defeat and say “I’ll never go hungry again!” (Or, you know, something original and pertinent to your story .)

At what point do you say too many struggles are just too much? Have you ever stopped reading a book because the hero/ine was too fixated with the past, or too passive, or just an all-around sad sack?

Photo by Margarit Ralev