Elements of Fiction (68)

Element 68: Empathy

I guess Empathy as a fictional element is one that the reader mostly provides, but as a writer you must make characters sympathize-able (if that’s even a word) so that the reader will have not problem generating that precious (for you, the writer) empathy.

As always, John Garnder has given this odd element some thought, “We care how things turn out because the character cares — our interest comes from empathy.”

“We empathize — it’s our chief way of learning. And the more complex the pattern of ideational connections — that is, the more fully we understand the scene adding up the facts, metaphors, and rhythms — the more completely we slip, unwittingly, into it, pitying, smiling at, or despising the crate. Thus the idea that the writer’s only material is words is true only in a trivial sense.”

“He must be able to report, with convincing precision, how the world looks to a child, a young woman, an elderly murderer, or the governor of Utah.”

“That is, in great fiction, we are moved by characters and events, not by the emotion of the person telling the story.”

John Ciardi makes a practical point, “Within a single scene, … it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.”

And wisdom from Ursula K. Le Guin, “Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.”

“Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.”

How about this from C.S. Lewis, “It’s no use telling us that something was ‘mysterious’ or ‘loathsome’ or ‘awe-inspiring’ or ‘voluptuous.’ By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, ‘how mysterious!’ or ‘loathsome’ or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you’ll have no need to tell me how I should react.”

And this from William Sloane, “All of us are persons who have never been anybody but ourselves, and if a writer can tell his story in terms of only one vicarious self the reader can become submerged deeper in the story than if he has to surface to change age, condition, and even sex.”

“The glory of fiction is that it gives us the effect of being someone else. This is the human reason why the means of perception is central to the experience of reading fiction.”

“The question one must always ask is, who is the reader being as he reads.”

I love this brilliant quote from John Fowles, “Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else’s imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.”

And here’s some more from Gardner, “We do sympathetically engage ourselves in the struggle that produces the fictional events.”

“In good poetry and fiction the writer speaks, first, to clarify in his own mind what he thinks and feels and, second, to make that clear to somebody else, on the assumption that the reader has sometimes felt, or can now be encouraged to feel, the same.”

William Gass makes this fine observation, “It [art] can only succeed through the cooperating imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out, for themselves, the artist’s world and make it round, and whose own special genius partly determine the ultimate glory of it.”

Donald Guttenplan agrees, “The lyrical beauty of the prose entices us into participation…. Consciousness must consent for literature to happen.”

I love this from Virginia Woolf, “The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.”

And let’s leave it at that.

Happy writing.

© Wolfstuff