Empathy: A Writer’s Superpower

As writers, when we empathize with our characters and plunge ourselves into their lives, we can do something no one else can…

With superhero movies such a dominant presence in contemporary culture, I figure it’s time for writers to step into the limelight and reveal our superpower. It’s not invisibility, although the media does a pretty good job treating screenwriters like some unseen presence when promoting the latest movie release. And it’s not the ability to fly although we are known to get lost in our writing as we lapse into flights of fancy.

No, our superpower is something which seems to be in short order nowadays at a time when the world and its citizens need it most.

That superpower is… EMPATHY!

Consider this definition: the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

Here are three ways a writer demonstrates empathy.

Empathy for other writers.

No one knows how damn hard it is to deposit one’s ass in a chair, day after day, and pound out a script or a book better than fellow writers. Here is a typical conversation between writers.

Writer A bumps into Writer B at a local coffee shop inhabited wall to wall with people pecking away at their laptops, each working in Final Draft.

Writer A: Hey, how’s it going with the writing?
Writer B: [long pause] Well…

Writer A just nods. They know. Whether Writer B is on page 10, 45, 70, or 90, the process of taking a story from Fade In to Fade Out is an enormous psychological struggle as well as a major time-suck.

Sure, there are writers who feel jealous of other writers, but by and large, since we are members of an exclusive club which traffics in both creativity and emotional torture, our first instinct is always to feel empathy for our fellow scribes.

Empathy for people in general.

Writers weep at TV commercials like this one:

It’s about gum. GUM! And a writer has so much empathy, we end up hunched over the TV, tears careening down our quivering cheeks as we struggle to compose ourselves.

Writers get caught up in the lives of perfect strangers. We head out for a fun day at the beach with the family when we pass by this couple:

We spend the entire afternoon in concerned conjecture: Do you think he’d had an affair and she just found out… Or maybe she had a miscarriage… It’s their anniversary, not of their wedding, but a tragic loss… A dog, they’re grieving the passing of Rusty, a chestnut fur labradoodle who used to bark at falling leaves, yet was terrified of squirrels, but the dog saved them from a house fire by waking them up…

Complete strangers who we just happened to pass by, now completely dominating our thoughts. Combine empathy with an active imagination and it’s a direct path to an emotional clickhole where we get lost for hours.

I know what you’re thinking.

Hey, Scott, crying at commercials… losing your emotional shit at the sight of passersby you don’t even know… that doesn’t make empathy a superpower, rather it’s a super drag.

The commercials and the complete strangers thing, that’s just a way to keep our real superpower warmed up for this:

Empathy for our characters.

This is the big payoff. When we start working on a story and immerse ourselves in the lives of our characters, we can identify so closely with them…

We see them.

We hear them.

We know their innermost thoughts.

Their very words emerge through our fingers on keyboard.

This empathetic superpower extends not only to sympathetic characters, but also bad guys, jerks, and complete assholes. We have the ability to dig down so deeply into total creeps that we can find some shred of humanity in them. Because hey, as a writer once said, “Even bad guys have moms.”

It’s that connection with our characters which empowers us to deposit our derriere onto chair and overcome the temptation to blow off writing for the day. It’s that emotional resonance with our characters which makes scenes come to life. It’s that empathy with our characters which causes the words to lift up off the page directly into the imagination of a reader so they ‘see’ the same story we have written.

That’s not magic, my friend. That’s the work of a writer’s diligence, persistence, talent, voice… and most importantly, the ability to so empathize with our characters, they live through our words.

Okay, so most writers don’t look like this:

Or this:

Or this:

For sure, we’re much more likely to look like this:

Slump-shouldered and pasty-faced, we stare at the computer screen for minutes at a time… gaze out the window until we lose track of time… pace back and forth burning a hole in the rug.

It ain’t easy.

But we’ve got one thing going for us. A really BIG thing. Our superpower.

Empathy.

As writers, when we empathize with our characters and plunge ourselves into their lives, we can do something no one else can, not even superheroes…

We can create stories.