How Much Do You Empathize With Your Characters?

[ADirtyPerv]

You’ll have to read the sequel to find out!

And who says it wasn’t Sam???

Cuz I read your damn short story and you clearly like Peta more. I figured that betrayal would hit you harder.

 

[StrentWriter]

Cuz I read your damn short story and you clearly like Peta more. I figured that betrayal would hit you harder.

Maybe something to take offline from this thread (DM me if you like) but that’s an interesting take - I internally am working towards a specific storyline and I’d say it’s the opposite way round.

If the short story was your starting point; maybe that’s not the best way to see the full material. The novel is 91,000 words and both of the main characters go through the wringer, a lot.

Thanks for reading it though, not sure the “damn” was necessary but thanks all the same for taking the time, sincerely.

 

[AG31]

For clarification, empathy is informally described as being able to feel the feelings of another person. Not to be confused with sympathy, which is the outward expression of emotion.

If you want to get technical, from the American Psychological Association's Dictionary: empathy, n. understanding a person from their frame of reference rather than one’s own, or vicariously experiencing that person’s feelings, perceptions, and thoughts.

When you're writing, how close do you feel to your characters? Do you feel what they feel, experience their joys and heartbreaks? Or are you more of a neutral observer?

When I'm writing, I'm totally inside the head of the MC. Empathy. It might, or might not be interesting that in ordinary life I'm not empathetic. I'm very sympathetic, and will take action on people's behalf to secure justice, but I don't experience things from their frame of reference.

Related question: Does your level of connection with a character change based on whether you're writing them or if you're reading somebody else's work?

When reading other people's works, I don't immerse myself in their experience, except for that rare bit of erotica that really works for me.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Every time.

 

[Britva415]

I'm very sympathetic, and will take action on people's behalf to secure justice, but I don't experience things from their frame of reference

Do you understand them? Relate to them? Recognize how they must be feeling even if it isn't how you're feeling?

That's all empathy. It isn't generally psychic.

 

[NuclearFairy]

I have alexithymia. Which means I can only feel one emotion at a time. Fortunately it is a relatively mild form of it, so the only times when I feel nothing is when I'm focused on a task. Which might be why I have a hard time focusing on things that are not emotionally heavy.

Anyways, writing is also kinda sorta therapy for me as well, in that I try to write people with complex emotions to try and understand what that's like. Sometimes, I have some small success and can actually feel in a very limited capacity when my characters have strong complex emotions. Usually though, I can only actually feel what they're feeling the strongest.

 

[Statius]

This is why I cannot read or write horror, in Lit terms CNC and the like; and why the prologue for my rewrite of Ria's Seduction took 3 months for 3.7 k words; I couldn't stand what I put her through.

 

[VerbalAbuse]

Here's what nobody here has the courage to say: I do not, repeat, do not, emphasizes with your characters.

 

[Statius]

Here's what nobody here has the courage to say: I do not, repeat, do not, emphasizes with your characters.

We all appreciate you not emphasizing our characters

 

[stickygirl]

I have alexithymia. Which means I can only feel one emotion at a time. Fortunately it is a relatively mild form of it, so the only times when I feel nothing is when I'm focused on a task. Which might be why I have a hard time focusing on things that are not emotionally heavy.

Anyways, writing is also kinda sorta therapy for me as well, in that I try to write people with complex emotions to try and understand what that's like. Sometimes, I have some small success and can actually feel in a very limited capacity when my characters have strong complex emotions. Usually though, I can only actually feel what they're feeling the strongest.

Complicated mixes of emotions take me a long time to figure out in myself as much as other people.

In a similar way it can take me days to figure out all the dynamics of a given situation - how different character might react in the moment because they have emotional history. I find it fascinating, if a little frustrated at how long it takes me.

 

[Erozetta]

Is it even possible to write anything that has characters without some sense of empathy toward them?

I mean... I'm sure it's possible, but I'm not sure I'd ever want to read any works written like that.

 

[AG31]

Do you understand them? Relate to them? Recognize how they must be feeling even if it isn't how you're feeling?

That's all empathy. It isn't generally psychic.

I think what you're describing edges more towards sympathy.

 

[Britva415]

I think what you're describing edges more towards sympathy.

No, sympathy is an attitude, not a sense.

I almost want to say it's not even a feeling. But if it is, it's feeling bad for the other person without feeling what the other person is feeling. It's a bad feeling caused by knowing "that's bad, I'm sorry" rather than by feeling that person's grief and pain.

Empathy is a sense. But it's not a psychic sense. And it isn't how you feel about the other person's situation - that's sympathy.

 

[anthrodisiac]

In my opinion, if an author isn't empathizing with any character, he/she shouldn't be writing that character.

Readers will know if a character is written in an emotional vacuum.

If we, as authors, don't feel empathy for our characters, how can we expect our readers to? Maybe there's a few sociopaths that write and feel zero ...

It seems like you're describing the difference between normal empathy (awareness, ability to relate) versus supernatural empathy (mind meld, Corsican Twins type sensory projection).

A writer who has no empathy at all could only write a character whose feelings are entirely absent from the story - or, at least, absent from the reader's experience of the story. A non-empathetic writer can write "she got mad" but can't make the reader care.

Is it even possible to write anything that has characters without some sense of empathy toward them?

I mean... I'm sure it's possible, but I'm not sure I'd ever want to read any works written like that.

Yikes...

I have very little empathy for my characters, but I also struggle with empathy more generally. What I am good at is prying open the inside of someone's head (usually metaphorically) and parsing why they feel a certain way, what makes them believe something, how their internal logic works. I know generally how emotions feel based on my own experience, talking to people about how certain sensations feel for them, and reading.

I've spent most of my life breaking down social interactions and human motivations because none of it comes naturally to me. It requires a lot of focus and analysis, because humans are complex and often words, intentions, and body language doesn't match up. It also requires me to emulate a lot of those feelings and put a lot of thought into my intonation, affect, body language, facial expressions, emphasis, how long to hold eye contact, what have you, because I naturally will be fairly flat and expressive myself in a straightfoward fashion (when I'm not being a sarcastic know-it-all, anyway). I feel like that's helped me immensely in crafting characters with eye on expressing emotion in ways that aren't simply, "She got mad."

Which isn't to say I feel nothing for them, or treat them as meat puppets with no soul who exist as my playthings and naught else. On the contrary, I try to make up for my dificulty with empathy by really digging into character motivations, sensations, and emotions. I'm not sure if at good at capturing it as I used to be, but I'd like to think I can at least construct multi-dimensional characters that people can connect with. Self-inserting helps, but I try to max out details about myself to a small handful, and almost always more psychological/thinking rather than physical attributes, because nobody wants to read a story about the same person's neuroses and hangups across a dozen different MCs. Luckily, I have plenty of spare

I will also say I've known writers who are empathetic, but write incredibly bland characters and have prose such as, "That made him angry," rather than focusing on the visceral nature of the anger and letting the reader deduce emotional state from non-explicit cues. But that's more of a skill issue than anything.

Also loved reading everyone's responses. Truly appreciate the amount of thought and care that go into your characters.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I have alexithymia. Which means I can only feel one emotion at a time. Fortunately it is a relatively mild form of it, so the only times when I feel nothing is when I'm focused on a task. Which might be why I have a hard time focusing on things that are not emotionally heavy.

Anyways, writing is also kinda sorta therapy for me as well, in that I try to write people with complex emotions to try and understand what that's like. Sometimes, I have some small success and can actually feel in a very limited capacity when my characters have strong complex emotions. Usually though, I can only actually feel what they're feeling the strongest.

Totally sympathize with this position (har har).

Seriously, though, totally get this. I'm very much the same in that I might feel a flicker of what that emotion is, but primarily from mapping it onto what I know about feeling that emotion. Sounds like you use writing as a deconstructive tool, which I've also found really helpful in learning and processing how other people think. Usually when people say writing is therapy, they're doing it to process their own difficult emotions, not necessarily to understand other people's. Nice to know it's not just me!

 

[NuclearFairy]

Totally sympathize with this position (har har).

Seriously, though, totally get this. I'm very much the same in that I might feel a flicker of what that emotion is, but primarily from mapping it onto what I know about feeling that emotion. Sounds like you use writing as a deconstructive tool, which I've also found really helpful in learning and processing how other people think. Usually when people say writing is therapy, they're doing it to process their own difficult emotions, not necessarily to understand other people's. Nice to know it's not just me!

The first story I actually sat down and wrote to completion was an attempt at understanding my roommate.

Honestly, my characters are at least as likely to be an attempt at understanding someone else, as they are to be self inserts. And to me, that's therapy.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

It depends.

Most of what I write for publishing is disposable in the sense that I forget about it, until I decide to recycle it a la Raymond Chandler: several of his Philip Marlowe series started out as short stories that he already published in Black Mask, and he recycled them in a process that he called cannibalizing, though it was more a fixup. I digress. In these disposable texts I don't usually feel empathy for characters. Quite the opposite. I'm a Goddess of debauchery, and I make sure my creations suffer under extreme hedonism because I'm a sadist for them. I stopped having darlings a few years back, so I put them in a conga line of trouble with no mercy for them, just to see if they pull out of it. Schadenfreude is what this is called.

The ones that get my empathy are those whose story I write because there's a compelling reason for me to write it; a reason that's deeply personal, or meant to close a bleeding wound in my psyche. Simply put, they are the Heroes, and they get my empathy not out of them as the archetype, but the situations they go through thanks to the cyclical structure of their stories, which already makes me root for them in a snap.

My NaNoWriMo from last year, which I don't think I can publish here because it has enough blood and gore to be considered snuff (in spite of being not titillating, but I don't like to go for maybes, plus my plan is to make it commercial) started first as an idea for a challenge I thought about on January, but as the year went on my life went through a sudden shift that I didn't just do the challenge, I forced myself to close an open wound in my psyche I didn't deal with, a wound that it screwed up with my body and pretty much turned my gut inside out. The empathy didn't come for the characters themselves, but from the situation I put them into. It is a very surreal plot, however the thing that kicked it off and the sharp turns it took mimic both the whole plot twist I had in my life back in the summer of 2024 which shifted my whole writing back to almost my cyberpunk roots, and the sudden disappearance of someone way too important for me in the summer of 2025. I knew I was heading towards a bittersweet ending that was more painful than happy, and yet I cried through whole night after I put the final sentence upon realizing that the whole situation that got me into writing that novel is irreversible, and it's over. Not the novel, that whole chapter of my life ended in a way that I didn't want it to end.

There have been other stories that underwent similar emotions since 2015. What's common about them is that I spent a long time drafting them, thus I get to spend more time with the characters. Some of the situations I already planned them to go through. Sometimes I expect to feel empathy for them. Sometimes, it overwhelms me. And sometimes it changes me, or it reveals something drastic about me.

 

[anthrodisiac]

My NaNoWriMo from last year, which I don't think I can publish here because it has enough blood and gore to be considered snuff (in spite of being not titillating, but I don't like to go for maybes, plus my plan is to make it commercial) started first as an idea for a challenge I thought about on January, but as the year went on my life went through a sudden shift that I didn't just do the challenge, I forced myself to close an open wound in my psyche I didn't deal with, a wound that it screwed up with my body and pretty much turned my gut inside out. The empathy didn't come for the characters themselves, but from the situation I put them into. It is a very surreal plot, however the thing that kicked it off and the sharp turns it took mimic both the whole plot twist I had in my life back in the summer of 2024 which shifted my whole writing back to almost my cyberpunk roots, and the sudden disappearance of someone way too important for me in the summer of 2025. I knew I was heading towards a bittersweet ending that was more painful than happy, and yet I cried through whole night after I put the final sentence upon realizing that the whole situation that got me into writing that novel is irreversible, and it's over. Not the novel, that whole chapter of my life ended in a way that I didn't want it to end.

Sorry for your loss. My best friend/person who read everything I ever wrote (except the stuff here) passed a month ago, so this hits really true right now. I wanted to address that before I threw myself into the whole...

I'm a Goddess of debauchery, and I make sure my creations suffer under extreme hedonism because I'm a sadist for them. I stopped having darlings a few years back, so I put them in a conga line of trouble with no mercy for them, just to see if they pull out of it. Schadenfreude is what this is called.

This might be the reason I don't put a lot of effort to actually empathizing with characters, besides the reasons I mentioned above. I started out in horror, and a lot of what I wrote was truly, deeply traumatic—both physically and psychologically. If any of my characters ever came to life, it'd be John Wick/Taken-level ass-kicking.

Similar reasoning as you, visiting upon characters trouble and turmoil to see how they react. As someone who went through heavy trauma, I know how transformitive it can be, and yet at the same time, it's rarely transformative in the way you think it will be. It's interesting to see one person perservere while someone I thought would pull through implodes. Plus, heavy psych background, so throwing wild and apocalyptic scenarios at people is always an interesting study in the human psyche. Testing the limits of endurance and tolerance with dark edge cases. It's like fictional, psychic vivisection.

Which is all so wildly different from what I'm writing here, it's funny. I've kept some of the moodiness and dark humor, but the challenges are more grounded—loneliness, being other-ized, masking.

Very much appreciate hearing your perspective, it's kinda validating.

 

[Erozetta]

Yikes...

I have very little empathy for my characters, but I also struggle with empathy more generally. What I am good at is prying open the inside of someone's head (usually metaphorically) and parsing why they feel a certain way, what makes them believe something, how their internal logic works. I know generally how emotions feel based on my own experience, talking to people about how certain sensations feel for them, and reading.

I've spent most of my life breaking down social interactions and human motivations because none of it comes naturally to me. It requires a lot of focus and analysis, because humans are complex and often words, intentions, and body language doesn't match up. It also requires me to emulate a lot of those feelings and put a lot of thought into my intonation, affect, body language, facial expressions, emphasis, how long to hold eye contact, what have you, because I naturally will be fairly flat and expressive myself in a straightfoward fashion (when I'm not being a sarcastic know-it-all, anyway). I feel like that's helped me immensely in crafting characters with eye on expressing emotion in ways that aren't simply, "She got mad."

Which isn't to say I feel nothing for them, or treat them as meat puppets with no soul who exist as my playthings and naught else. On the contrary, I try to make up for my dificulty with empathy by really digging into character motivations, sensations, and emotions. I'm not sure if at good at capturing it as I used to be, but I'd like to think I can at least construct multi-dimensional characters that people can connect with. Self-inserting helps, but I try to max out details about myself to a small handful, and almost always more psychological/thinking rather than physical attributes, because nobody wants to read a story about the same person's neuroses and hangups across a dozen different MCs. Luckily, I have plenty of spare

I will also say I've known writers who are empathetic, but write incredibly bland characters and have prose such as, "That made him angry," rather than focusing on the visceral nature of the anger and letting the reader deduce emotional state from non-explicit cues. But that's more of a skill issue than anything.

Also loved reading everyone's responses. Truly appreciate the amount of thought and care that go into your characters.

Little is not none.

People can be empathetic without being able to write characters they empathize with, and people can lack empathy in real life but show empathy towards their characters. Being a person who can empathize doesn't automatically make them empathize with their characters, that is a distinction that I think is worth pointing out.

I think it shows more in the types of stories I write. I tend to have characters who are put through the ringer. I have to empathize with my characters because I tend to emotionally torture them, and if I'm gonna torture characters, I should feel it myself as I'm writing it. If I don't, my readers probably won't, either.

As I write, if I don't feel the fear, confusion, dread, hope, whatever that my characters are feeling then I'm not in the right mindset to be writing them, and the writing ends up feeling generic and lacking in the emotional department. If I can feel it, I can put it on the page more accurately, and that means the reader is more likely to feel it.

If I'm reading something that just lays out the emotions without any attempt to show those emotions, I'm probably not gonna finish the work (unless there's a reason for that coldness established, such as a viewpoint character who feels no empathy.) If it's done sparingly as a way to establish a hidden emotion (think something like, "I smiled, and beneath that smile, I seethed. One more fucking word from him and he'd learn why I wasn't to be trifled with. But, could I beat the shit out of him while smiling? I looked at his shit-eating grin again and my smile widened. Oh yeah, definitely.") or as a way to keep the flow going (too many words can kill an intense moment) then it can work well as a style choice.

It comes down to knowing when to tell and when to show. Too much showing and your pace/flow is gonna be shit. Too little and the engagement for the reader is bland and non existent. There's a balance that comes into play that feels natural. "She got mad" isn't necessarily bad depending on what surrounds it. Big lead up of shit going down can hit a nice stride that allows space for the emotional impact to be summed up in a tell without slowing anything down. And sometimes the big shit needs to be tempered with slowed down prose to give the reader a moment to digest the intensity of what's going on.

Everything depends on everything else.

A straightforward sex romp doesn't necessarily need empathy to be felt or displayed from the author. An intense psychological horror with sex being a prominent component is most likely going to benefit from author empathy towards the characters a lot. Reverse those and a highly empathetic sex romp is likely to feel wordy and bogged down by bad pacing/flow, while the psych horror that lacks empathy is likely to feel detached and uninteresting.

 

[NuclearFairy]

It comes down to knowing when to tell and when to show. Too much showing and your pace/flow is gonna be shit. Too little and the engagement for the reader is bland and non existent. There's a balance that comes into play that feels natural. "She got mad" isn't necessarily bad depending on what surrounds it. Big lead up of shit going down can hit a nice stride that allows space for the emotional impact to be summed up in a tell without slowing anything down. And sometimes the big shit needs to be tempered with slowed down prose to give the reader a moment to digest the intensity of what's going on.

So something like, "That was it, the last straw, the butterfly on the camels nose. Finally, she got mad," might work?

 

[Erozetta]

So something like, "That was it, the last straw, the butterfly on the camels nose. Finally, she got mad," might work?

Potentially, depending on what's around it and the flow and tone of the rest of the story. But I would drop the butterfly part and reword it to "That was the last straw. She was finally mad." Or "I'd finally broken the last straw, and she was mad." Or "Her final fuck had been given thanks to my antics. In short: She was fucking pissed, and I shrank back." But that's just me. You word things however feels right to you, as long as it works within the frame and tone of the story, it'll most likely work out. If it doesn't, you try again..

 

[AG31]

No, sympathy is an attitude, not a sense.

I almost want to say it's not even a feeling. But if it is, it's feeling bad for the other person without feeling what the other person is feeling. It's a bad feeling caused by knowing "that's bad, I'm sorry" rather than by feeling that person's grief and pain.

Empathy is a sense. But it's not a psychic sense. And it isn't how you feel about the other person's situation - that's sympathy.

I don't get your point. I totally agree with the distinction you make between sympathy and empathy..... So?????

 

[EdwardsOtherSide]

All or nothing for me, and if it's nothing, stand the fuck by.

If I have no empathy for a character, I am venting at a person or real life character/pattern of behavior. This character will not be treated well.

Usually, most of the time I have a lot of empathy for my characters, but occasionally too much. I slip into their headspace, like it there, and it spills over into my life when I am not writing.
In the past, I didn't get the stories about Bram Stoker getting really weird while he was writing Dracula. Now, it makes a lot of sense to me.
My "fallen angel, loushe eternal student and bon vivant" character in Fallen For A Nun... yeah. Looking at the world through his eyes is a happy place for me. (Now, if only I could afford his lifestyle.)

 

[Britva415]

I don't get your point. I totally agree with the distinction you make between sympathy and empathy..... So?????

My point is that you called my previous point "edging toward sympathy," and I disagree. I wasn't describing sympathy.

That's the only point. You were the one making it, and I pushed back. It doesn't get any deeper than that.

 

[MaudeBlack]

For my Rebellious series, I try to be empathetic. I also have to remind myself that she is an 18 year old young woman. And, more importantly, remind myself what that was like and some of the poor choices I made back then (And am still making, thank you very much).
At the same time thought, Taylor (the MC), is written to be a bit of an egotistical little madem. She's not someone I would want as a friend. But that's kind of the point. Her story is a redemption arc (with plenty of sex and bikers) where she finds herself and learns to treat those around her with more respect.
My general rule (as a very new writer who hasn't yet learned any rules) Build her up > Let her think she's winning > Watch her fall.
Sit back, smoke a cigarette and admire myself as a bigger cow than my character is.

It's a good and interesting question.

Xx