Writing Empathetic Characters

A year or so ago, I saw a movie that was both visually innovative and incredibly fast-paced. Unfortunately, I left the theater feeling no attachment to the slim story or poorly defined characters. Later, when I discussed the movie with a friend who had also seen it, he couldn't believe that I didn't like it.

“Didn't you see it in 3D?” he asked.

I told him that I had, and he seemed stupefied that I still hadn't enjoyed the movie. I tried to explain to him that I just couldn't care about whether the main character survived the variety of deadly encounters she kept having.

“So you’re telling me that seeing a human being in peril doesn't matter to you?” he said. “You just don’t care if another person lives or dies?”

I realized that my friend was just trying to goad me into a pointless argument and I let the matter drop, but the truth is that while I do care about another human being in peril, I felt that the filmmakers had failed to make their fictional character a human being. I was never convinced that the protagonist was anything more than a figure on the screen, and without that emotional investment, I found myself simply not caring what happened to her. So what can writers do to create characters that their readers will care about?

The first way is to give a character some background or depth. Alfred Hitchcock, the great director and storyteller, once described suspense as “the addition of information.” The more we know about someone, the more potential we have to relate to her. Of course, a writer can go overboard with too much information about their characters. The trick is to give enough information to make the character relatable while leaving enough up to the reader’s imagination to give your audience a sense of ownership of the people in your story.

Another way to build an empathetic character is to give her some noble qualities. Readers often react to story characters the same way that they react to real people. As a result, the average reader will be more drawn to characters that they like rather than ones that annoy or disgust them. Even if your character is an antihero, consider giving her at least one redeeming quality to entice the reader to spend some time following the life of this otherwise unpleasant person.

Similarly, readers who enjoy following characters that are likable will usually prefer a character that is  above-average in some way. We enjoy reading about characters who are a little more skilled, stronger, smarter, or prettier than their peers. Look at the popularity of superheroes in our current culture for just one example of this sort of hero worship in popular fiction. Of course, being exceptional doesn't mean that a character doesn't have any problems. Difficulties of all sorts are a part of everybody’s life, and so it needs to be a part of your character’s life. The trick is to make those problems hard enough to be interesting while avoiding the need to constantly save your character through the intervention of convenient literary devices.

Above all, remember that you as the writer must be the first person to care about your characters. Always keep that in mind, and you won’t ever have to rely on 3D to make your story and characters engaging.