[— Karen Myers —]
What am I doing when I write fiction? Well, at its most stripped-out elemental depth I’m engaging the emotions of the reader — externally through a narrative of the actions, and internally through the perceptions of the characters.
I want to make myself (and then the readers) feel… gasp, cheer, worry, hope, despair, fear, love.
The stories you read (barring your very early childhood) where nothing bad happens are rarely satisfying — even cozies need conflict in some form, like food needs salt. (Else, my reaction to such a story is “so what?”)
Negative emotions can (and should) disturb the reader (and some readers have limits) — malice, injury, despair, horror, death. There are certain universals, the violation of which can cause many readers to wall-slam your books [don’t kill the dog, you bastard!] You can choose how close you come to those things, how vivid you make them, and it will become an indelible marker of your brand — one of the reasons people choose to read your books vs someone else’s, where the reading experience that justifies avoidance may be stronger than the attraction of tempting blurbs. Once you lose them, they may never return.
I’m pretty hard on my characters sometimes — they learn to rise above adversity and it makes them stronger, but it’s not a pleasant process. Some of my more tender-hearted reviewers take me to task for that, but the moral worlds of my fantasies require struggle and tenacity. Toughness is a virtue.
A similar reader divide drives the notorious problem of the closed or open bedroom door. We can write it either way, but do we really want them to squirm in their seats? My take on it is: better the fact of sex, left mostly to the varied imaginations of your varied readers, than the act of sex, lest you descend into porn. I want them to remember the emotion of it, not to use it as a guide for private moments. This choice defines entire classes of fiction (e.g., “clean”), so there’s no denying that reader opinions are divided but strong.
Ultimately, we are showing our readers a little set of actors on an artificial stage, and we have to make them forget all the stage scenery and the sketched out characters with their barely delineated drives and motives, and the threads and levers backstage.
We want our readers to put themselves into the story, to experience it as the characters do, to empathize with them… and it helps if we can do that ourselves when we write it.
Yes, I know one can write genre-fiction-by-the-numbers without investing in it personally, but that’s not something that turns my leaves green — the craft, without the soul. The pride in good craft is all very well, but an important part of why I write is to experience the construction of a world that I can get lost in myself, too, before I shape part of it for a reader’s enjoyment. I get a kick out of playing god in my little universes, and I feel the responsibility of it, too — if it’s going to be me-as-deity vs chaos, then I need to take it seriously and feel for my characters and their lives, before I judge their fates.
What about you?
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to “Empathy”
Personally, I’m a “the heart wants what it wants” kind of writer, so I’m stuck writing Author Appeal stuff and hoping other people enjoy it too. I tend to be very impressed with people like Dorothy Sayers who can think “well, I enjoy mysteries and they seem to sell well, so I’ll write one, load up the sleuth’s lifestyle with Author Appeal, and go from there.” People who can write to market and please themselves at the same time.
Yeah. I ended up writing the fanfic thing because I fundamentally disagreed with someone else’s position that a character would be most awesome as a loner.
To me that seemed more like a special ring of hell. So I wrote what I think that does to the character and what I figured would get them out of it. I think it turned out pretty good, and I’m still getting monthly reads, even though I probably put it in too high of an age rating.
Those universals are … very universal. My family played a cooperative game for a while; it involved saving people from a burning building, and putting out the fire. We had to remove the tokens for a cat and a little red-haired girl from the pool of potential victims, because if we lost them there was a tendency to forget that this was just a game, and deep mourning was the result. (The cure for the mourning was a demand to play again and win and sometime we just didn’t have that much time… lol.)
Writing the death of a sympathetic supporting character and the grief of his father was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do.
What are the worst words any creative person can hear?
The Eight Deadly Words.
If I don’t care about any of these people, why am I reading their stories?
(This has been my biggest issue with the “popular” Amazon Kindle stories. That and a lot of these authors don’t know how to write compelling characters.)