Conveying Caring when you don't

cattywampus · Apr 28, 2006

I've been working on a mystery novel for years. Several people have read chapters and given helpful advice. One reader said she lost interest in the storyline because no one seemed to care. The living characters didn't care about the victims, the detective didn't seem to care about anybody.

Because I suffer from depression, I myself don't care much about a lot of things. My characters do care, but somehow I didn't convey it. Do you think it's possible for a person who has never experienced childbirth to write about it convincingly? About a character who is undergoing cancer treatment? Or should I just forget the whole thing?

Anya Smith · Apr 28, 2006

cattywampus said:
I've been working on a mystery novel for years. Several people have read chapters and given helpful advice. One reader said she lost interest in the storyline because no one seemed to care. The living characters didn't care about the victims, the detective didn't seem to care about anybody.

Because I suffer from depression, I myself don't care much about a lot of things. My characters do care, but somehow I didn't convey it. Do you think it's possible for a person who has never experienced childbirth to write about it convincingly? About a character who is undergoing cancer treatment? Or should I just forget the whole thing?

No, you shouldn't just forget the whole thing. It's hard to convey emotions one never experienced, but it's being done all the time. Actors, writers do it. Read some similar novels and see how other authors do it. Show the emotions in actions and internal thoughts. I don't write mystery, so I can't be more specific, but whatever you do, don't give up.

CaroGirl · Apr 28, 2006

Yes, I think you can write convincingly about an experience you've never had. Imagination and empathy go a long way. You need to be able to imagine what it would be like, feel like, even smell like, to be the character in your story, in whatever situation you stick them.

Research can also be important if you're unfamiliar with the details. Historically, great authors have written very convincingly about places they've never been and things they've never done. Where would sci-fi and fantasy be if people had to live everything they write?

If you can imagine it, you can write it.

Sireen · Apr 28, 2006

I agree CaroGirl. Empathy can substitue for experience. In addition, a certain detachment can also be beneficial when developing a plot or building characters, because you can observe without confusing your thoughts with theirs. Your characters can experience what you are not.

chartreuse · Apr 28, 2006

cattywampus said:
I've been working on a mystery novel for years. Several people have read chapters and given helpful advice. One reader said she lost interest in the storyline because no one seemed to care. The living characters didn't care about the victims, the detective didn't seem to care about anybody.

Because I suffer from depression, I myself don't care much about a lot of things. My characters do care, but somehow I didn't convey it. Do you think it's possible for a person who has never experienced childbirth to write about it convincingly? About a character who is undergoing cancer treatment? Or should I just forget the whole thing?

I have no choice but to believe that people can write convincingly about things they haven't experienced, because otherwise that would leave me very little that I could write convincingly about!

As far as your particular story, and the comments from the people who have read it, you might want to ask them some "deeper" questions to get a better idea of where they felt the story went wrong. It's not necessarily a given that people (even the reader) care about the victim. Most mystery novels are not really about the victim at all - the murder is just the catalyst, or jumping off point, for the story you're actually telling.

The detectives should, in my opinion, care about something, but not necessarily somebody.

Whoever your main characters are, just make sure that you know what motivates them - what they want, what they have to lose, etc.

JanDarby · Apr 28, 2006

cattywampus said:
I've been working on a mystery novel for years. Several people have read chapters and given helpful advice. One reader said she lost interest in the storyline because no one seemed to care. The living characters didn't care about the victims, the detective didn't seem to care about anybody.

This sounds to me like an issue of motivation for the main character(s), rather than one of portraying emotion. I don't really see a problem with no one caring about the victims -- it's almost a tradition in cozy mysteries to have a terribly unlikable character die, so a lot of people would have apparent motives to kill him/her -- but if the detective doesn't care about solving the crime, then there's no reason for the reader to care about the solution to the crime either.

So, rather than focusing on the abstract concept of "caring," think about the specifics of why this particular detective HAS to solve this particular crime. If it's a professional detective, there should be a financial or career incentive, at least, and then you'd also want to have a reason why the money or career advancement matters to him. If it's an amateur sleuth, there's usually some personal involvement, something beyond mere curiosity, something that will keep him digging for the truth, despite risks and challenges. Often, the sleuth is a suspect, or the sleuth's best friend is a suspect, or the victim was a friend and there's a cover-up. Then, it's not so much a matter of portraying emotion (which I'm the first to admit is not my own strong point), but a matter of establishing a reason for the character to care about the solution of the crime, and then allowing the reader to fill in the blanks.

JD

zeprosnepsid · Apr 28, 2006

I think JD's advice is great. They just have to care about something, not necessarily people. Look at Moby Dick. On a basic level it's about Ahab's obsession the with the whale. He's not a good guy, he doesn't care about anything else or anybody else, but he cares about that one thing and that makes him somewhat relatable. Also, the shipmen have a connection that comes with being on a ship together. They care about each other in a way their position defines because they have to work together. But it's not emotional necessarily.

smalleststar · Apr 28, 2006

I would agree with Jan that it's an issue of motivation rather than 'caring'. It has to matter what happens in the story, or else why read on? It could be that your characters are emotionally involved with each other and the reader identifies with (at least) one character, and so they care what happens - but to me that sounds more like literature than mystery. Or it could be that something in the storyline matters to a particular character - a character the reader identifies with - like maybe it's the last chance for this detective or PI? There has to be a character that the reader identifies with, is rooting for, and there has to be something happening in the story that really matters for that character.

Maybe the difficulty you're encountering is not about conveying caring, it might be something as straightforward as point of view. I don't know if other writers would agree with me here? Certainly I find that unless you manage that trick of getting the point of view really close to your main characters, then the whole story can seem a bit 'so what?' Maybe you really need to zero in on one character, think hard about what matters to that character, and make that one person your main POV character, see everything through their eyes. What matters to them will then matter to your reader.

I hope you won't be discouraged. I think imagination is everything. I've never been through cancer treatment, but I've been through childbirth a couple of times and it was dreadful (and nearly deadly on one occasion), but really nothing unimaginable for someone with imagination. Before I was a parent, I used to be nonplussed by friends who were parents who used to suggest the whole experience was utterly beyond someone who hadn't done it. Well, they were lying or lacking in imagination. Imagination requires depth of experience, I think, it doesn't demand that you have been through a specific experience yourself, but it requires you to have been pushed into particular emotional zones (like loss, love, helplessness, hate, self-loathing, whatever). So long as you have enough depth of experience in those zones, you can generalise them from one experience to another.

Don't be put off. It's probably a matter of craft, in terms of writing technique, and instead you're thinking it's something to do with you. I would bet it's not.

Best of luck
Deborah.

mesh138 · Apr 28, 2006

honestly

If you don't care, it will show in your work and no one wants to read anything that the author doesn't care about. IF you don't care, trash it and write something your heart connects with.

zornhau · Apr 28, 2006

Dwight Swain has a good section on this, IIRC.

Basically, show them respond viscerally, and through thoughts and actions. Possible dead body in room. Protag fights nausea and tries not to hear the children playing in the garden. Forces herself to enter the room etc.

Linda Adams · Apr 28, 2006

From the sound of it, she's the only person who made that comment. I wouldn't rush out to fix the story based on only one person's comments because she may have picked up on something different than what she thought it was. In my experience with critiquing, I've often found that people sometimes won't like something but may not fully understand why, so they come up with comments that may not state the actual problem.

For example, the story's characterization might be one dimensional. Or the characters may not have motives or reasons for what they're doing; they may just feel to the reader like they're chess pieces in the story, to be moved at will when needed.

If you get three or so comments of the same kind from different people, then it's a problem that needs to be fixed. Otherwise, keep an eye on all the critiques for pieces that may lead to how you can find out where the readers are stumbling. It may literally come across as different, seemingly unrelated things--but that all point to the same thing. Giving lots of critiques will help because you're likely to see the problem in someone else's first and then realize you've done the same thing.

Cat Scratch · Apr 28, 2006

You obviously care about this manuscript, or else you wouldn't put the effort into writing and rewriting it. Perhaps you can channel that feeling into the motivation that JD was talking about as a way of changing the character's POV. You don't have to have witnessed a murder to know what it is like to care about SOMETHING. Actors sometimes use a Stanislavski method where they recall sad things from their own past to summon emotion necessary for a sad scene. But the thing they recall could have nothing to do with the scene. It all translates, regardless.

Vomaxx · Apr 28, 2006

cattywampus said:
Do you think it's possible for a person who has never experienced childbirth to write about it convincingly? About a character who is undergoing cancer treatment?

If novelists could write convincingly only about things they had personally experienced, the world would have many fewer good novels.

The Red Badge of Courage is considered one of the greatest war novels ever written. Stephen Crane, born six years after the Civil War ended, never served in the army.

Click to expand...

Tracy · Apr 29, 2006

Caring

Two points: There are only a finite number of human emotions, and I imagine we have all felt all of them: e.g. fear, anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, love, joy. We can take those emotions and use the memory of them to describe the characters emotions - even if we have not experienced the actual circumstance.

So if it is reasonable that your character would feel fear in a situation, describe how you felt fear in a different situation. I find that as a writer I mine my own emotions. Even in the midst of great fear, I find myself thinking, "oh, so that is what fear is like. My heart is thumping and my hands are sweaty and I have this lump in my lower stomach."

I appreciate that this is not as easy if you have depression. I suffered from depression when I was younger and it was like being at the bottom of a swimming pool - images and sounds came through, but distorted and muffled. In the same way, for me at least, when I had depression the emotions and perspectives came through distored and muffled.

Can you remember a time when you felt strongly? Mine that.

The other suggestion I have is to raise the ante for your characters. Your detective might not care - well give him a reason to care. Make it essential to him that he solves this murder. Maybe he has not been doing too well in his job recently and he is on his final warning. If he does not solve this he loses his job, and he has a large family AND a sick wife AND a gambling addiction which needs feeding AND the house is suffering from subsidence. Okay, I am exaggerating now, but the basic point is serious. I recently saw the Bruce Willis film Hostage - he HAD to solve the hostage crisis because the life of his own family was on the line. It made the whole drama much more involving (as much as any Bruce Willis film can be involving!) because of that.

The more that is riding on him solving the murder, the more he will care and the more the reader will want him to succeed.

You can also raise the stakes similarily for the other characters.

Good luck with it.

janetbellinger · Apr 29, 2006

Of course you can write about things you never have experienced. That's what fiction is all about. If you want to experience the emotions involved, read real life stories about childbirth and cancer treatment. That will steep you in the emotions involved. Do not give up.

Janet

SC Harrison · Apr 29, 2006

People are different, and they react to situations differently. By the same token, some readers will view the behavior of your characters as unrealistic, because it doesn't represent the way they would react. This (imo) can't be fixed, but if your cast of characters is diverse enough (emotion-wise), most readers should be able to relate to at least one of them.

As Linda said, until you hear the same thing from multiple crits, you may just be dealing with personal preference. One of the questions I asked my little group was: which character was your favorite, and which one would you like me to take out of the story completely? One of them wanted me to take out my MC, and promote one of the others in his place, because she liked the other better.

Linda Adams · Apr 29, 2006

SC Harrison said:
People are different, and they react to situations differently. By the same token, some readers will view the behavior of your characters as unrealistic, because it doesn't represent the way they would react. This (imo) can't be fixed, but if your cast of characters is diverse enough (emotion-wise), most readers should be able to relate to at least one of them.

Very true. I had a real life incident where that particularly become obvious. I was driving a shuttle with three passengers and headed out the gate. Something was wrong with the gate, and it closed on my van. I groaned silently, told my passengers the van had just gotten hit, and got out to look at the damage. It wasn't a big deal because that particular gate had been malfunctioning like that before, so it wasn't my fault. As was the proceedure, all the passengers had to write a statement on the accident. One of the women passengers reported that I had gotten very angry and started swearing. I was very surprised, since I had done neither and generally swear very, very little to start with. She was apparently reporting on the way she would have reacted, not on the way I actually did react.

SC Harrison · Apr 29, 2006

Linda Adams said:
She was apparently reporting on the way she would have reacted, not on the way I actually did react.

That's weird. I guess it's a radical form of "projecting", or maybe her thought patterns are so insular she tunes out the world around her and only remembers her internal reactions.

As far as being a reader, I can usually adapt to a variety of characters, as long as their humanity is revealed to a certain degree. I'm more likely to be turned off by an excess of emotion, unless the character in question is supposed to react inappropriately, due to a psychological malady of some sort.

Unless somebody asks me to crit their work, which I'm not very adept at. If you look for flaws and inconsistencies in human behavior, you will surely find it.

janetbellinger · Apr 29, 2006

I think that is very true, SC. I know I can accept deviations from the norm in a character, even a character that shows no emotion, as long as a justification is given for that behavior such as a distant parent or something.

Jamesaritchie · Apr 29, 2006

Experience

It's great when you can write about personal experience. When you can't use your own experience, however, you use someone else's.

I've never experienced childbirth, but it's easy enough to talk to someone who has and use her experience.

Conveying Caring when you don't

cattywampus

Anya Smith

House Dragon

CaroGirl

Living the dream

Sireen

chartreuse

JanDarby

zeprosnepsid

smalleststar

mesh138

zornhau

Swordsman

Linda Adams

Soldier, Storyteller

Cat Scratch

The Peacock Next Door

Vomaxx

Tracy

janetbellinger

SC Harrison

Dances With Hamsters