The Hard Work of Empathy
The question came from someone whose judgment I respected, which made it harder to dismiss.
He was widely read and wrote serious, academically minded reviews of books and films. After reading part of my first novel, he asked me—almost with a laugh—how I could possibly have written letters from a teenage Texas girl in 1938 to her boyfriend.
I couldn’t tell whether he was amused, impressed or skeptical. He may even have meant it as a compliment. But the question stayed with me.
Novelists routinely step into the minds of people who are younger, older, richer, poorer, braver, crueler or more frightened than themselves. They write about murderers without having murdered anyone. They write as people who lived hundreds of years before they were born.
Why, then, did this particular crossing seem so impossible for him to believe it of me?
My first answer should have been: That is what fiction writers do.
But the more I considered the question, the more I realized that the real answer involved a word we have flattened almost beyond recognition.
Empathy.
Empathy is a funny word. When I hear it, I tend to think of feeling sorry for someone. The word seems passive, almost like sympathy dressed up in better clothes.
But that is not what empathy really means.
The dictionary describes empathy as the action of understanding, being aware of and imaginatively experiencing another person’s feelings, thoughts and experiences.
The important word is action.
Empathy is not standing outside someone’s life and feeling bad for them. It is making the effort to step inside that life and see the world from where they stand.
That is especially important in writing.
I could research Texas in 1938. I could learn about the clothes people wore, the music they heard, the work they did, the way mail was delivered and what was happening in the world around them. I could study the expectations placed upon a teenage girl and the limits imposed upon what she might say or do.
All of that was necessary. But research could only build the room.
I still had to sit at the table with her.
What would a teenage girl notice that I might overlook? Would she write about chores, the weather or something her mother said before finally approaching what she really wanted to tell her boyfriend? Would she accidentally smudge her ink?
Was she writing freely, or was she conscious that someone else might see the letter? Did she want to tell him that she missed him without appearing too eager? Would she write one sentence, reconsider it and replace it with something safer?
Historical facts could tell me what might have been sitting on the table beside her. They could not tell me what she was afraid to put on the page.
That required imagination—but imagination by itself was not enough. Imagination without effort can easily become assumption. It can turn another human being into a stereotype or, even worse, into a disguised version of the writer.
The important question was not whether an older man was permitted to write as a teenage girl.
The question should be:
Had I worked hard enough to understand her before asking the reader to believe her?
That is the hard work of empathy.
Had I considered the choices available to her—and the choices that were not? Had I given her private hopes that had nothing to do with advancing my plot? Had I allowed her to misunderstand people, contradict herself, make mistakes and keep secrets? Had I stopped using her merely as a character long enough to let her become a person?
The work also required me to set aside the question, “What would I do?” That is often the easiest question for a writer to answer and the least useful.
I was not trying to imagine myself as a teenage girl in Texas in 1938. I was trying to imagine her. Her choices had to grow out of her family, her community, her time, her personality and her understanding of the world—not mine.
I may have been preparing to write fiction long before I knew it. I am naturally curious about people—perhaps sometimes I stare too long. When I see someone, I often begin wondering what that person’s world is like. What does he want? What is she worried about? What happened before she entered the room? What will he return to when he leaves?
I do not merely notice people. I begin imagining the lives surrounding them.
Perhaps that is part of what makes someone want to write. Curiosity makes us look at another person. Empathy makes us wonder what the world looks like from where that person stands. Writing allows us to follow that question into a life beyond our own.
I needed to go around that “flattened” word and look behind it and around it.
Harlan Coben makes a related point in his memoir about writing, Plot Twist. He tells his children:
“Remember every single person has hopes and dreams.”
That simple sentence may be the beginning of empathy.
The stranger passing us on the street, the waitress who brings our coffee, the minor character who appears on one page and the teenage girl writing a letter in 1938 all have hopes and dreams.
They want something. They fear losing something. They may carry an old disappointment that no one else can see.
A writer’s job is to look for those things.
A minor character should not exist only to deliver a package, serve a meal or provide the clue that solves the murder. For the short time that person is on the page, the writer should remember that he or she has a life beyond the immediate needs of the story.
That does not mean we must provide the life history of everyone who walks through a scene. It means the writer should feel that unwritten life in the background. When we recognize that every character has hopes and dreams, even a small character begins to behave like a person instead of a piece of furniture.
This idea also reaches beyond fiction.
When someone tells us a story from his or her life, our first impulse is often to compare it with something that happened to us. We begin composing our answer before the other person has finished speaking. We think we understand because we have experienced something similar.
But empathy requires harder work.
It asks us to remain inside the other person’s story a little longer. What did the experience mean to that person? What part of the story is difficult to say aloud?
Sometimes empathy means helping another person find the story he or she is trying to tell—not supplying our own version of it.
That may be why empathy feels like such a flat word. We use it as though it describes a pleasant quality: She is an empathetic person. It sounds like kindness, concern or sorrow.
Those are valuable feelings, but empathy asks more of us.
Sympathy can stand at a distance and say, “I feel sorry for her.”
Empathy pulls out the chair and sits down.