Writing with Empathy

How empathy is the tie that connects writers with their reader.

I will never forget when I first connected with a fictional character. Like most preteen girls, I was eager to escape reality. My escape was reading and I read anything I could get my hands on. That day, it was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I read the first chapter and I was instantly charmed. It didn’t matter that the book was set in time well over a hundred years ago or that the characters weren’t real. These were my people. These March sisters understood me.

“‘It’s so dreadful to be poor!’ sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.”

It really, really is. I thought, looking down at my own old dress.

That day, a whole new world opened up for me. I realized that not only could I find myself in books, but I could find others in there, too. Like the March sisters in Little Women, I was wracked with sympathy over the plight of the Hummels, a poverty-stricken family in even worse circumstances than their own. This made me think of others around me who were suffering through even worse circumstances, and little embers of empathy were kindled.

Stories are the great connectors.

We humans love a good story, don’t we? We are connected by our collective stories and storytellers are the great connectors of the human race. A good storyteller lights innate sparks of empathy inside all of us as they help us recognize our own experiences in the stories of others. Expert storytellers fan those sparks until they flare up, burning down everything you thought you knew. Then, without you realizing it, you aren’t the same person as you were when you started.

After reading Little Women, I connected with countless other characters, delighting in each recognition of myself on the page. At first, most of them were a lot like me, or who I wanted to be. I adored Gone with the Wind and Anne of Green Gables, rereading them over and over again until they became a part of me.

As I got to know these characters and understand their motivations, I began to learn about myself. As I read about Sethe and how she endured a reality that I, even during my hungriest and saddest of days, could never comprehend, those tiny embers caught and raged trough me, leaving new feelings in its charred wake. My heart was bruised black and blue over her pain and despair. For a moment, Morrison made me feel what she was feeling. Isn’t this the ultimate goal of us writers?

Years later, I learned that Morrison was inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner. Garner escaped slavery in 1856 and was chased across state lines by slave-bounty hunters. Feeling that her daughter was better off dead than alive as a slave, she killed her two year-old daughter as the bounty hunters closed in on her and her family. Desperate, she turned the knife on herself but was caught before she could end her agony. I remembered the distress I felt over Sethe’s own desperation and my heart was shredded anew.

This hopeless desperation is something I could never begin to understand in my own life. But Morrison, expert storyteller that she is, made me feel Sethe’s pain. I lived with her pain while I read, and because of this, my small world changed. My heart ached with hers and my sense of empathy and understanding for my fellow humans expanded until I wasn’t the same Sarah anymore.

Practicing empathy

At its core, empathy is the ability to understand and share the emotions and feelings of another person. It’s when we imagine ourselves walking the hard mile in someone else’s shoes. Empathy is a skill that can be taught and the best storytellers learn to master this skill. After all, writers want nothing more than to connect their characters with their readers.

So, how does one go about this? How do we help our readers connect with the characters we love? To care about them? To even hate some of them yet understand their motivations? Let’s explore a few ways to practice empathy and to create characters that our readers will care about.

Let’s be real

First, we ourselves have to care about our characters and what happens to them. Robert Frost reminds us, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” Readers can smell a fake a mile away. Be genuine. Care about what happens to your character and while you’re at it, make your character believable. Not everyone is perfect. Morrison’s Sethe killed her own baby out of desperation. This horrifies the reader. But we understand why she did it, even if the thought of it makes us want to vomit.

Details, man

Life is in the details. In Little Women, the dire circumstances of the Hummels stuck with me. “A poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken windows, no fire, ragged bedclothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group of pale, hungry children cuddled under one old quilt, trying to keep warm.” I was cold just reading about it and my young self-centered heart ached when I imagined the little family struggling to stay warm. Use details to make your character’s situation real.

Practice. Practice. Practice.

We need to practice empathy in real life. There are many ways to do this. Go sit at a coffee shop and look around. Can you pick up any vibes from someone lonely? Happy? Sad? What makes you think that they are feeling any of these things? Write down these cues. Use them.

Let your mind wander for a few minutes as you scribble some notes about what you perceive about their situation. Or better yet, if you are brave enough, strike up a conversation and find out if your impressions were correct. It doesn’t matter if you were right or not. What matters is that when you begin to write and think about others, you transcend your own world to connect with the rest of humanity.

And, finally, remember why.

We need to remember why we practice empathy.

Empathy is the soft tie that binds us to one another as humans. Empathy allows us to gently blow the dust away from long-forgotten corners of ourselves as we discover that we aren’t as alone as we often feel. Empathy is the great expansion pack for humans. Soon, with practice, we find that our small worlds, our closely held opinions and our hearts have expanded to embrace more than we thought we were comfortable with.

With this expansion, we find more of a connection with our fellow humans on their own journey, and just as importantly, we discover a greater empathy for ourselves. Morrison explained in a 1993 interview in the Washington Post, “The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved — the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you.” If empathy is the tie that connects us with one another as humans, connecting to our own beloved, our innermost self, is the first step in connecting our readers to our other beloveds-our characters.

Empathy towards ourselves is vital, and as writers who agonize over every word, we are often desperately in need of this self-empathy in large doses. Employing more compassion towards our own work allows us to be just a little bit braver with our work. Too often, writers are more chicken than human and our work never gets out into the world. Our characters stay in our heads, pecking reproachfully at our thoughts, reminding us that we haven’t allowed them out to play. Empathy towards ourselves, and our work, allows those characters, those ideas, to come alive-just as Sethe came alive for me long ago. Then, if we are lucky, we realize that we aren’t the same person we were before we began our story and we dare to hope that our readers, or at least one of them, feels the same.

(Article originally appeared on Medium: Writing with Empathy)