Creating Character Empathy, Part Two: stirring empathy in the reader

If you missed Part One of this post, you can read it here.

I can pick up this pencil, tell you its name is Steve, and then snap it in half - and part of you dies, just a little bit on the inside. Because people can connect with anything. We can sympathize with a pencil, we can forgive a shark... People can find the good in just about anything except themselves.

— Jeff Winger, Community.

It's true, isn't it? You might think, for instance, you could never sympathize with a rat. But the creators of the children's movie Ratatouille got us to do exactly that.

The miracle of human empathy is what enables a writer to create a powerful emotional response in the reader. The reader knows the people she is reading about are not real.

Yet still, she cares. 

And if she cares enough about the character, she cares (even quite deeply) what happens to him.

She's invested in the story.

This is the experience every author should strive to create in the reader.

But how? We can't make someone care for an imaginary person, can we?

Well, no - not exactly. Stirring our reader's emotions to create an empathic connection is not like pressing a button on a CD player - it's more like wooing a lover by playing the violin. 

There's an art to it, a subtlety. It takes practice, and each musician brings their own style and flavor to the piece. 

But like any instrument, it can be learned.

Here are some skills to add to your repertoire.

1. Capture the little human details

Your first job is to convince the reader that your character is, in fact, real. To make them so flesh-and-blood, so living and breathing, that the reader stops thinking of them as a character in a book and regards them instead as a real person.

You can do this by incorporating the small, realistic, quirky details that seem lifelike precisely because they imitate life - in all its variety and personality and color.

Jodi Picoult is a master at capturing lifelike details in just a few sentences. Take this simple description of the protagonist's grandma:

"She was the same as always, picking the skin off the roasted chicken to eat when my mother wasn't looking, emptying her purse of perfume and makeup samples she'd collected for my sisters, discussing the characters on All my Children as if they were friends she visited for coffee." - Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

Picoult doesn't describe the grandmother's hairstyle or wrinkled skin here: instead she captures personality. In these couple of sentences we get a feel for who this woman is. 

It's the little things that make a character seem real. An author could tell us a string of facts about this old lady and who she is or where she's lived, but none of that is as vivid as showing us an image of her picking the skin off her chicken over dinner.

2. Use deep POV

This is an entire subject on its own - but suffice it to say that your use of Point of View can either create distance between the character and reader, or bring the reader right inside the character's head.

One way to do this is by expressing the character's thoughts right in the flow of narrative, without setting
them off in italics. In the classic, "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers", Browne and King state, "One of the signs that you are writing from an intimate point of view is that the line between your descriptions and your interior monologue begins to blur."

For instance, instead of this: 

Stacey looked at her boss lounging in his chair, stomach bulging over his belt, and felt revulsion. I wish that lazy pig would do something for himself instead of ordering us around! she thought.

Try this:

Stacey looked at her boss lounging in his chair. His stomach bulged over his belt. Ugh. What a disgusting pig of a man. If only he could be bothered to lift a pinky finger for himself once in a while instead of sitting there ordering everyone else around, then perhaps he wouldn't be such a lump of lard.

The difference? There's no need to "tell" the reader that she "felt revulsion" - we're inside her head, experiencing her revulsion firsthand. This sort of intimacy is essential to creating empathy.

3. Give your character a wound

Even an unlikeable character can be made empathetic if we know the reason why they are the way they are.

I've just seen the movie Saving Mr.Banks, which portrays the author of the beloved Mary Poppins books as a crotchety, rigid woman, impossible to please and generally quite rude to everyone around her.

And yet, by the midpoint of the movie I felt for this wholly unlikeable woman so deeply that I was dabbing away tears several times before the end. How did the screen writers achieve this? (Spoiler alert)

By giving her character a backstory - a larrikan father who loved his daughters and delighted them with his playful nonsense, and yet ultimately drank himself to an early grave. Throughout the movie we were shown this tragic decline through the intimate eyes of his daughter: the father's slow slide into alcoholism, the way his irresponsible behaviour shamed and ruined his family, the increasing stark hopelessness of the mother. 

Without being told, we could intuitively understand how a young girl would be scarred and shaped by these events for the rest of her life -- how she might re-make herself as a person as far removed from her loveable but reckless father as possible: hard-edged, sensible, determined.

4. Use humor

The thing about giving your character a wound is to avoid making her a helpless victim. Someone who sits around feeling sorry for herself and moaning "Woe is me!" doesn't inspire empathy so much as irritation.

Sue Monk Kidd does this brilliantly in her novel, "The Secret Life of Bees." On the third page, we're let in on the fact that Lily's mother died when she was four. Lily carries a deep wound in her heart, that much is quickly clear, but there's nothing maudlin about the way she tells us:

That night I lay in bed and thought about dying and going to be with my mother in paradise. I would meet her saying, 'Mother, forgive. Please forgive,' and she would kiss my skin until it grew chapped and tell me I was not to blame. She would tell me this for the first ten thousand years.

The next ten thousand years she would fix my hair. She would brush it into such a tower of beauty, people all over heaven would drop their harps just to admire it. You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair. My hair was constantly going off in eleven wrong directions, and T. Ray, naturally, refused to buy me bristle rollers, so all year I'd had to roll it on Welch's grape juice cans, which had nearly turned me into an insomniac. I was always having to choose between decent hair and a good night's sleep.

It takes a very good author to take a tragic circumstance and inject humor, without taking anything away from the real feelings involved. Instantly, we're on Lily's side, and we feel for her deeply.

So there are four ideas for creating empathy in the reader. There are so many more! Why don't you share some of your tips in the comments section? Which of these comes naturally for you, and which do you struggle with?

Karen Schravemade lives in Australia. When she's not chasing after three small children, she spends her spare minutes daydreaming about the intricate lives of characters who don't actually exist. Find her on her website and Twitter.

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