Empathy: The Writer's Most Powerful Tool
Of all the tools in the writer's toolkit, none reigns as supreme as Empathy. Roger Ebert is famously quoted, “...the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Storytelling writ-large puts us into other humans’ lived experiences or dreams that beget a reflection toward a key part of our shared humanity. Movies, in particular, take that integral aspect of storytelling and concentrate it into a particle accelerator to blast it straight into our souls. The undergirding principle affecting us here is empathy.
Audiences are experiencing empathy when a character is devastated by the loss of a loved one. The audience is feeling the character's devastation. Conversely, the audience is feeling euphoric triumph when the home team makes the crazy comeback at the end of the movie. Empathy makes us sit on the edge of our seat and hang on every word because we feel what the characters feel.
Why empathy should be prioritized
Before making the 2024 Palme D’or winning Anora, Sean Baker made another film featuring sex work called The Florida Project. We see the mother in The Florida Project make some very poor choices, but the film isn’t judging her–it’s begetting us to realize she doesn’t have any good choices. She can’t get hired locally, her trick-turning with perfume is denied, so she turns to sex work to continue paying rent for her child. When the sex work enters the plot, we don’t see it. The perspective is through her child Moonee’s eyes. It lingers off-screen, unbeknownst to Moonee, but felt by the audience. The film subtly is nudging the viewer to empathize with their precarious situation.
While empathy is at the pinnacle of small-scale character dramas, it's also driving the viewer to care about our favorite heroes that allow us to escape ever-so-temporarily from reality to fun, bombastic, zany universes and alternate realities. Will our hero make it? Will they get the love of their life while vanquishing the evil sorcerer? Probably, honestly. But we are on the edge of our seats the entire way despite it all.
As the storyteller, you hold the power to control the emotions of the audience. And empathy, as the means to that end, can be utilized in different ways: using your own empathy to enrich your characters to live very different lives than you or by leveraging the audience's empathy to (benignly) manipulate them into being invested into your story.
Centering your strengths
Every writer has different natural strengths and affinities for what comes more naturally and what needs to be laboriously tended to mature their craft. Being cognizant of your own strengths and weaknesses as a writer will help you establish your own unique voice. The specificity of your lived experiences–how your culture socialized you; how your family dynamics informed your personality; how you perceive your identity and relate to your community or not; whether you’re living in a community as a member of the majority demographic or a more marginalized demographic; if the systemic infrastructure of your society privileges you or not–create your unique voice that only you can offer to the world.
“Write what you know” is an oft-repeated platitude to young writers because there is merit to it. Only you have lived your life, and your perspective on life, even if it’s ever-so-slightly, will be different than everyone else’s. Understanding the specificity of yourself will help you establish what you're strong at. What your voice is. And if you are cognizant of the specificity of your own lived experience, you can start being cognizant of others’ specific lived experiences and how those experiences affect their actions.
If writing what you know is the base of your storytelling voice, empathy will help you expand the base and branch out to create characters and conflict you couldn’t create with your lived experiences alone. Storytelling from your own lived experiences versus evoking the experiences of another isn’t an either-or situation–it’s in addition to. You combine them.
Show don’t tell
Putting the viewer in another one’s lived experience or evoking another’s emotions is the strongest aspect of storytelling–lean into it! The audience will react differently depending on how you depict your story beats. If your character is on the phone with their best friend describing the break-up and they say they’re devastated, the audience will feel sorry for them, but will they feel devastated? If you show your character fleeing from their break-up by speeding down the road and blasting their favorite love song in which their scream-singing with tears streaming down their face, the audience will feel their devastation.
Telling begets sympathy; showing begets empathy
By showing your character’s emotions through their actions, you are forcing the audience to feel what the characters are feeling, and the audience will vicariously take the same journey your character is undergoing. The same principle is why sports fans are euphoric when their team wins a title even though they aren't playing themselves. Humans are gregarious complex animals. Empathy and sympathy help us connect and interact with other humans. It binds us together, even if we live worlds apart.
So use it to your advantage!
Lean into it by placing yourself in another’s shoes first
By leveraging people’s empathy, you are making them invested in your story. In your characters. In the lives of another. You can embrace this leverage by first putting yourself into other people’s shoes to hone your empathy, by treating it as a skill to train. Think about someone in your life you may not care for very much, and try to understand what forces have acted upon them to make them act the way they do. Perhaps they had a bad relationship with a parent and they’re resentful of yours. If you fully explore the why’s and how’s of other people’s circumstances, you begin to give grace to people for their mistakes.
We’re all human. We all make mistakes. And your characters will make mistakes. Most storytelling is about a character overcoming a central flaw. We’re asking the audience to give our characters the grace to change. That our characters aren’t perfect. That they’re just people, or at least simulacra of people. By giving people in your life grace, you can start to empathize with their situation, which doesn’t excuse their negative actions, but it does give you insight into how they came to be as they are today. By giving your characters grace, you may find some unexpected outcomes.
Your characters may surprise you
When you fully subsume yourself into a character, you may find that the character makes a decision that you did not expect. That plot point you had in mind may not make sense anymore because of this decision your character makes, but it will enrich your character and the conflict they’re undergoing by doing so. Let the characters lead you. A new plot point will materialize. Trust your characters.
When you invest into your character’s agency, they move past the archetypal box they would otherwise be enclosed into. Again, humans are complex. We hold within us contradicting viewpoints and multitudes of overlining reasoning for everything we do. Does your character doubt all their actions and self-introspect to a fault? Do they deny any flaw they may show by lying to themselves or by self-mythologizing as to why the flaw exists and that it's not even a bad thing? Let your characters be broken. And then let their peculiar case of brokenness guide their actions.
Your storytelling capabilities become limitless
By showing your characters grace and allowing them to have agency, your character base expands exponentially. Your dialogue becomes more naturalistic and specialized to each character. One character becomes terse because they were verbally brow-beaten as a youth to only speak when spoken to. Another becomes verbose because they’re insecure and in constant need to explain every little detail of every little thing.
Utilizing empathy is essential to achieving your storytelling goals, to learn your own voice, to learn how to leverage the audiences’ emotional investment, and to create compelling enriching characters that the audience wants to invest in.
So get to it! Start empathizing. Start showing grace, and imbuing your characters with all the specificity you can muster. And I’ll be the first to buy a ticket and vicariously experience your character's emotional journey.
