Wednesday, August 3, 2016

E is for Empathy

Paula thinks about how readers empathise with characters. 

Empathy is defined as ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’, and this is exactly how we want our readers to react to the characters in our stories. We want them to engage with the characters, experience their emotions, and as a result, care about what happens to them.

How do we achieve this? Unless we empathise with our characters, we can’t expect the reader to do so. We need to know them, put ourselves in their shoes, and live the story with them. If we let ourselves feel everything that a character feels, then our readers will feel it too. It goes without saying that those feelings must be shown, and not simply ‘told’ to the reader. If a character is angry, don’t simply say ‘she was furious’. Think about a time when you were angry. How did you feel? What did you do? Now show what your character does and feels, while keeping them ‘in character’, of course.

What about the times your character is experiencing something you’ve never encountered? Imagination is always good. In Irish Inheritance, my hero and heroine are in a large Victorian house at night during a power cut. They hear a loud crash from downstairs and make their way down the stairs with only a small flashlight. Now that’s never happened to me, but in my imagination I lived the whole scene with them. It was late at night when I was writing it, and my heart was thumping like mad. I even found myself glancing nervously over my shoulder a couple of times.

There are, of course, many ‘universal emotions’ which we’ve all felt at some time in our lives – fear, sadness, anger, even jealousy or loneliness, and hopefully happiness, excitement, anticipation etc. Therefore, even if you have never experienced a specific event, you probably have another experience you can relate it to. If, for example, the heroine is nervously waiting to audition for a TV drama, think about a time when you were nervously waiting for something e.g. an interview for a job. Harness the memory of your own emotions, and project them to your character and their situation.

Showing the characters’ reactions in a realistic way helps readers to empathise with them and relate the emotions to their own experiences.


10 comments:

  1. Good advice Paula. We need to be inside our character's head and BE that person.

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    1. Now I wonder where I've heard those words before, Carol? ;-)

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  2. Absolutely true. I was always taught to show not tell and it works beautifully.

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    1. I would expand that to feel and and then show :-)

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  3. To help with the whole 'show don't tell' thing, I printed out a bunch of lists on body language and how our bodies react in certain situations. It really comes in handy for when I put my characters into situations I've never experienced.

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    1. The Emotion Thesaurus is good for body language, but I wish it gave more 'internal sensations' in addition to the long lists of physical signals of different emotions. I'm more interested in how a character feels than in what they do!

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  4. Excellent advice. You really need to feel everything your character feels.

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    1. Thanks, and yes, I feel it is essential. It is the key to bringing a story alive and making the characters seem real to the reader.

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  5. I refer to the Emotional Thesaurus often for ideas on showing emotion through body language. I try not to use verbatim what is in it, but it often triggers inspiration.

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    1. Although I use Emotional Thesaurus as a guide to the physical signals, I tend to rely more on my own imagination/experiences for the internal sensations of my characters, since I think these are more important than the external physical reactions in helping the reader to engage with the characters and feel what they are feeling.

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