Choosing Relatable Descriptions to Power up Empathy

There is something that has been rattling around in my subconscious for a while, and it finally clicked into the forefront of my mind: relatable descriptions.

I have found unrelatable descriptions in my own writing.

I have found them in other people's writing.

It's not that the unrelatable is always bad or wrong. It's that, like everything, it has a place it should be and a place it shouldn't be.

And where it should not be is in empathetic writing--when you want the reader to feel, empathetically, what the character feels.

Let me give you an example to illustrate.

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Selecting the Right Sentence Structure for the Right Emotion

Today's post builds off some other posts I've done:

Pros and Cons and Types of Third-Person
Point of View Penetration
Exactly How to Create and Control Tone
Writing Empathetically Vs. Sympathetically and Sentimentally
Let Your Reader Do the Work
Raw vs. Subdued Emotion: Getting Them Right in Your Story

But you don't have to read them to get something out of this one.

It's just that today's topic relates to deep point of view (the deepest point, point 4), creating emotion in your reader (instead of on the page), and controlling tone.

Hopefully if you've been following my blog for very long, you understand the importance of getting your reader to feel powerful emotions as opposed to just writing about the emotions.

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Deviating the Reader's Experience from the Character's

In my last post I talked about how subtext works and how to (not) write it. I mentioned that in some places, in some stories, you may want to make your reader's experience deviate from your character's experience.

Uh oh.

Does that not break a writing rule? Don't we want to write our stories so our readers feel like they are experiencing what our characters are? After all, I wrote that whole post about writing empathetically instead of sympathetically and sentimentally, and before that I wrote this post about putting the emotional tension in your reader, instead of writing about it on the page.

So what gives?

There are some situations where making your reader experience something different (and sometimes the opposite) of your viewpoint character is exactly what you want and need to do. So let's talk about how to break this writing rule properly.

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Writing Empathetically vs. Sympathetically and Sentimentally

Several weeks ago, I read a story that had a passage like this:

"My parents never really cared about me," Allie said. "All my life they saw me as a disappointment, a waste of space. I was always the butt of their jokes. And no one really noticed. I was always last place, as far as they were concerned. I had a really difficult childhood. . ."

And it went on like this for about a paragraph or two.

I could see that the writer wanted to foster sympathy for the character, wanted to explain how the character felt about her upbringing.

But ultimately, it made her sound whiny--and I could tell that wasn't what the author intended.

At first I was a little sympathetic to the character. . .then after several sentences, the writing just felt sentimental to me, meaning, I felt like the writer was trying to coax me to feel a certain way, like I was being controlled, rather than letting me feel for the situation myself. 

It's a good idea to want your readers to connect with your characters' hardships, but it can backfire if it's too sentimental or sometimes even when it's sympathetic.

Instead, when you want to impact the reader, strive to create empathy.

Usually when I hear empathy, I think of someone who is in pain, going through a lot of difficulty, but really, it's a level of deep understanding--whether that's an understanding of fear, bravery, or obsession.

Here are two examples to illustrate empathetic writing.

In The Maze Runner, I got to a scene where James Dashner wanted to show that his main character, Thomas, was a hero with a good heart--but I could only tell because I'm not just a reader, I'm also a writer. He didn't write about it sympathetically or sentimentally, he created empathy simply by putting us in Thomas's head and showing us what he did in a given situation.

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