How to Use Empathy in Fiction

Once upon a time, a couple of houses and jobs back, I took a book off my crammed to bursting bookshelf, sat down, and read it for the first time. I'd picked it up at a used book sale, recognizing the title of the book, and thought that I should get it because it was frequently recognized as an important book. I'd never heard the label "great" applied to it, but it had plenty of other adjectives attached, so I took a chance. The novel had one strike against it: part of it had been excerpted into a story I'd read in high school, a story I'd thought was idiotic to the extreme. In any case, I was older and hopefully wiser, and ready to forgive the book that particular section.

So, as I said, I sat down and began to read. It took me several hours of the course of two or three days to finish it, but the amazing thing was there wasn't any lapse of emotion in-between those times. Each time I picked it up, I was just as horrified, just as enraged, working under the same lightning-strike epiphany that hit me about a third of the way through: this book was true in the sense of the universal reality we all want to capture in our work, not in the more mundane sense of having actually happened. This character, though I'd never seen the conditions or experienced the hellish conditions that were his life, spoke to me and showed me what he felt, what he thought. Despite our vast differences, we had things in common, ideas we could share, and that made the novel all the harder to take. When I finished, it felt like the aftermath of rage.

That novel was Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I haven't read it since; I probably will never read it again. Some things in life you don't need to experience twice, because the first time doesn't leave you. Of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of books I've read in my life, Invisible Man is one of the few that I truly consider great, and the reason for that can be summed up as empathy.

Everything that gets brought up in the great communal conversation on craft that writers of all stripes engage in has a place. Good fiction is a concatenation of parts, and each one serves a vital purpose. But, in order to make something great, you have to do something unique: you have to connect a fictional character to a reader you'll never meet. You have to allow that reader, whoever it may be, to get inside the inhabitants of your story, to understand them and feel them, to know what it is to be in their shoes in that situation. Nothing else will do. Sure, plot and dialogue and a thousand other things, if cleverly constructed, will give a reader a thrill, connect the dots at speed and deliver them to an ending that they feel is satisfying. Even if that's all there is, there's a place for that type of fiction, and I enjoy it just as much as the next reader. We're not talking about that, though. Our sights are on greatness. We have to push a little harder for that.

Understanding a character is more than just liking the character; in fact, those two states don't have to be connected at all. For one, as has been pointed out many times, a completely understood character is boring, in life and literature. If you know what they'll say, how they'll react, why wait for them to do it? You can fill in the blanks and move on, and that attitude isn't going to help you get inside the character; more likely, you as the reader will just want out.

Moreover, a protagonist does not have to be likable, or even charming, in order for a story to succeed, and in many cases, it makes for a much more believable character. Even though I wouldn't consider it great literature, one of the reasons I admired Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho was even though Patrick Bateman was a complete and utter nutjob (and no matter how you interpret the ending, he's still bonkers), there were glimmerings of humanity there, feelings of wonder and doubt that I as a reader could identify with, even while being repulsed by the subject matter. To achieve empathy for such a maniacally unlikable narrator is pretty difficult.

Reaching this empathic connection is also more than just making a rounded, fleshed out character. If I don't feel the character, see what they see and understand why they do what they do, then they do not come alive for me, no matter how much effort the author has put into their construction. How can you begin to get into the story if you don't feel how and what the characters feel? Some people might argue that this feeling is a by-product of a fleshed out character, but I don't agree: I've read many a story or novel where the characters, despite being well-built and having a life that came off the page, had no resonance for me. Some books I've tossed away before finishing because of this, or finished reluctantly: examples of either case are too plentiful to go into, and besides, it's more fun to look at the ones that do it right. Here's an example from the first few pages of John Irving's The World According to Garp, a book from a man who knows how it's done:

Her declared major had been English literature, but when it seemed to her that her classmates were chiefly concerned with acquiring the sophistication and poise to deal with men, she had no trouble leaving literature for nursing. She saw nursing as something that could be put into immediate practice, and its study had no ulterior motive that Jenny could see (later she wrote, in her famous autobiography, that too many nurses put themselves on display for too many doctors; but then her nursing days were over).

She liked the simple, no-nonsense uniform; the blouse of the dress made less of her breasts; the shoes were comfortable, and suited to her fast pace of walking. When she was at the night desk, she could still read. She did not miss the young college men, who were sulky and disappointed if you wouldn't compromise yourself, and superior and aloof if you would. At the hospital she saw more soldiers and working boys than college men, and they were franker and less pretentious in their expectations; if you compromised yourself a little, they seemed at least grateful to see you again. Then, suddenly, everyone was a soldier--and full of the self-importance of college boys--and Jenny Fields stopped having anything to do with men.

"My mother," Garp wrote, "was a lone wolf."

Just judging from the above excerpt, not necessarily the warmest character around (and that impression just gets stronger as the novel goes on), but one who is made wholly comprehensible by the narrative. Everything else falls into place behind her, including the other characters. If this were the only empathy-inducing character in the novel, the story might fail, but she's not by a long shot. Good thing too, because everything else Irving throws in, from the Under Toad to the Garp family's driveway accident, would mean little without them.

If I manage to capture that quality in my work, I'll consider that success. Reaching out and touching someone through your words on a page; that's neither art nor science, that's magic. And who doesn't want a little more of that in their lives?