Tag Archives: empathy

Techniques for sympathetic characters

18 June 2009 Jordan 4 Comments

This entry is part 6 of 11 in the series Creating sympathetic characters

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

Mechanics

Stealing Word Nerd Wednesday!

12 June 2009 Jordan 5 Comments

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

Jordan McCollum