Empathy

The way i see it is, there are many different kinds of people in this world, none of us are perfect, so if you want to write, write, there's no one can stop you and there will always be someone else who feels (lol in your case ) exactly like you.

I'm a knob.

A lot of what I write about includes a protagonist who is a knob.

Write what you know?

The Backward OX said:

eh.

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Actually it's "eh?"

Ah... blessed Canadianisms.

I don't think empathy is necessary. Otherwise, I'd just be writing about events that have happened to me. I'm not even sure that sympathy is needed. Or maybe it is...hmmm...

Personally, I feel zero empathy for most real people I meet, but I can empathize with created people. Probably because they're caricatures, and even when something is "subtle" in terms of writing, it's still distilled and blatant due to the context. I don't have to deal with trying to sort out vocal tone inflection and conflicting facial expressions, because I create the expression I think they have in my mind as I read or write. I don't think you necessarily have to have empathy (I cry for cartoons, and not for live action, for the most part) but you do have to pay attention, so that what you write rings true, and inspires empathy in your readers.

Personally, I think empathy matters a lot.

You don't have to have experienced the things you write about, and that includes basic human emotions. You just have to write compelling prose that will convince your reader that your characters are experiencing those things. This may require a lot of research on your part, but it's not impossible.

ClaudiaGray said:

Personally, I think empathy matters a lot.

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Me too. I think it's key to creating believable, non-cardboard characters for your readers.

The Backward OX said:

What are your views?

Is empathy a necessary characteristic in a fiction writer?

(Can you cite any well-known author who openly claims to have absolutely NO people skills?)


I have a reason for my questions.

I have no natural people skills, I don’t have feelings about people . . . and I am toying with the idea of writing fiction.

Is it a lost cause?

Or can I successfully write about people without having a clue regarding the ways in which people relate to each other?


Before you jump in and say everyone has feelings about people, consider this: I have Asperger’s Syndrome. If you don’t know what that means in terms of this discussion, maybe you should move on to the next thread.

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Could be an interesting experiment. I say, go for it and see what comes out. You could become the next horror king, or the "Vulcan" author whose characters are all logical, emotionless and efficient. Seriously, it could be really good IMO.

There are a few writers on this board with Asperger’s Syndrome. I don't think its stopping them.

The Backward OX said:

What are your views?

Is empathy a necessary characteristic in a fiction writer?

(Can you cite any well-known author who openly claims to have absolutely NO people skills?)


I have a reason for my questions.

I have no natural people skills, I don’t have feelings about people . . . and I am toying with the idea of writing fiction.

Is it a lost cause?

Or can I successfully write about people without having a clue regarding the ways in which people relate to each other?


Before you jump in and say everyone has feelings about people, consider this: I have Asperger’s Syndrome. If you don’t know what that means in terms of this discussion, maybe you should move on to the next thread.

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I can think of a small handful of writers with autism or asperger's syndrome who write well and with empathy. John Elder Robison (an AW member himself), Temple Grandin (if you haven't read her book "Thinking in Pictures", go to the library right now and read it), and Daniel Tammet. I don't at all think of them as lacking empathy.

Lacking people skills and lacking empathy aren't the same. There are loads of authors with poor people skills.

Do I think you're a lost cause? No. And I think that all writers study human beings very closely. It's part of the job. For you, that job might be a little harder. But in the end you're just studying people.

One way that writing is easier than dealing with real people: You know when someone says something cruel to you, and you're sort of stunned, and you mumble something stupid and walk away feeling like crap? But then that night before you go to bed you think of the most brilliantly cutting and vicious comeback, which would have made the situation turn to your favor, had you said it earlier? If you're writing it down instead of experiencing it, you can take HOURS to work out exactly the right thing for your characters to say. You can plan a conversation out as carefully as a NASA shuttle launch. You have complete control over every character and everything they do.

Empathy, in terms of writing, isn't quite the same as empathy in terms of living everyday life, anyway. As a writer creating empathy, you just create a character and a situation that has something that reminds your readers of themselves. An easy example: almost everyone feels empathy towards Harry Potter. Why? He's got no one in his corner and it seems like the whole world is against him. We've all felt like that at times. He has a huge responsibility to everyone and he's afraid it's too large a burden for him to handle. Again, we've all felt that way before. So then we, as readers, say yeah! Come on, you can do it! And when he (Harry) is victorious, we are victorious along with him.

Thus ends Sarah's Guide to Empathy For Beginners.

But seriously, stick around on the AW forums, and you can learn a lot, get encouragement, and get feedback on your writing.

I think that you are possibly in a very unique position - one that could allow you to study people and how they interact *objectively* from the outside instead of through emotional filters that the rest of us are looking through. While that might be a rather lonely pursuit, I think it might also give your writing a certain edge in character creation. It might even make it easier, since your own feelings wouldn't constantly be imposing on your characters.

Try it. See how it goes. No reason not to, right?

Shadow_Ferret said:

There are a few writers on this board with Asperger’s Syndrome. I don't think its stopping them.

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At least one of them is published, as well.

Also, I would say that it depends on how you define empathy. For instance, having a hard time interpreting what other people feel is not the same as NOT CARING about people or NOT BEING INTERESTED in them. I have a hard time interacting with most people in real life, and I have few friends. But that doesn't mean I'm not fascinated by humans. I study others constantly, trying to figure out why people do the strange things they do (and yeah, why other people do stuff is often a mystery even to those of us without Asperger's). I read books about weird neurological disorders because I'm fascinated with how the brain functions. And in spite of my difficulty communicating it, I care quite deeply about other people in my life. All of which is how I can suck so badly in social situations and yet invent characters that leap off the page as if they were real.

Interestingly, here's another side of the issue. There's a woman in my real-world writing group who is... I am not quite sure how to say this, but I have never met anyone else who had such little knowledge about people different from herself. She's part of an ethnic minority (in our area), and she knows nothing of any culture except her own. She even has a job that revolves around her culture. Any time she writes about someone outside of her religion, age group, ethnicity, and even gender - it just falls completely flat. But you know what? She writes what she knows - and all she knows is herself. Almost without exception her main characters are thinly veiled versions of herself, experiencing thinly veiled versions of her own life. But you know what? She KICKS ASS at writing herself. Her use of language, the depth of her understanding, everything. It's just beautiful. Maybe someday she'll expand, maybe she won't, but either way there's no denying she's a damn good writer. If she wrote a memoir, it would get snapped up instantly.

One final thought... regardless of our differences, we're all human. That means, deep down, we all have the same core desire to love and be loved. If you know yourself, you've got a good start on knowing others.

I would rather the reader have empathy for my characters, then write my characters emphatically.

As a teenaged writer with a mild case of Asperger's Syndrome, I say that if you feel the need to write, go ahead and do it. I've sometimes wondered if it had any effect on the way I write characters, but I do the best I can.

The Backward OX said:

This lady must have something more than self-knowledge.

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Yeah, she works her butt off at writing well. She went to school to study literature and creative writing. She has a hugely busy life, and yet she makes the time to write - and then show up to our critique group and really listen to the feedback people give her.

I too can write up a storm about myself. But as to it being saleable – I don’t think so.

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Well, that's not a matter of empathy, it's your level of skill.

Perhaps she has what I lack - the ability to care about people. One can only write about themselves in terms of how they interact with others. A story about a life of interacting with people only as they are useful to one, which is how my life unfolded, is unlikely to win over readers.

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If you don't care about anyone, why are you trying to get published? Why do you write at all? If you only care about yourself, you should be happy to write whatever you want and have yourself as the only reader.

Notice how you skipped over the fact that there are plenty of other people out there with Asperger's who have written successfully.

But if that's your attitude - that everyone who is successful must have some "secret" that you don't - then go ahead and quit. Nobody's stopping you.

The one trait a good fiction writer should have is the ability to lie.

Rolling Thunder said:

The one trait a good fiction writer should have is the ability to lie.

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Right. Didn't Uncle Jim make a T-shirt that said something like, "I'm a writer: I tell lies for a living"?

Yep. It's the best advice I've heard yet on writing fiction. Writers create murderers without ever having murdered a person themselves. They create creatures nobody has ever seen. Empathy can be faked, just like anything else in fiction. The trick is to fake it well enough so the reader is drawn in and feels the emotion, even if you don't.

The Backward OX said:

Can't quite see the logic behind the first sentence. As to the rest of it, you may well be correct.

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Let me put it this way: publication means other people reading your work and hopefully enjoying it. If you don't care about others, presumably you don't care what other people think. If you don't care what other people think, you shouldn't care about publication.

Unless you want to do it for money, in which case you should quit right now and go find a more productive way to spend your time.