Being a Better Writer: Empathy for Your Characters

Greetings from Alaska, readers! Yes, that's right, I'm home visiting my parents for a few days. And old friends. It's fantastic. I flew in Sunday morning, after a nice long layover in Seattle which was most of my Saturday. As usual, the trip to my hometown was roughly a full day's journey. That was okay, however, as I'd brought my WiiU with me.

Yes, I own a WiiU. I also own The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. So when I had my fifteen hour layover, well ... I had plenty to keep me occupied. No spoilers, but man is that game fun. Complete, go anywhere freedom.

Again, no spoilers, so I won't say much about my journey thus far. But it has been an excellent one. You ever played Fallout? Well, imagine that kind of freedom and setting applied to the land of Hyrule and Zelda series, and that's Breath of the Wild. The scale is titanic, the world ambitious beyond almost anything I've ever played, and the tools and toys you can play with offer a kind of freedom few games can match.

Of course, we're here to talk about books, not games, so maybe I should change my topic. Bring things back to the site's primary focus. Being a Better Writer, right?

So, what is the topic of choice today? Well, if you'll check the topic bar for the day, it's actually having empathy for your characters. This topic is one that actually hadn't made it to my list, if only because it came in via message from one of the readers here (So ... Hello Feather Note, this is your ship coming in), and as I was traveling, I figured "Well, why not? That's a good topic worth discussing, and I can pull it off from a borrowed Chromebook."

So, empathy for your characters. There are a couple of angles I can come at this with, so I'm going to talk about the most obvious one first, or the one that, I think, most readers will jump to first: getting the reader to have empathy for your characters.

Connect with the rest of this post at Unusual Things

Comments

[ThePoneDrome]

Fantastic blog. I find that this is one of the hardest skills to use when I'm writing, so I gotta get better at that.

And speaking of empathizing with characters and such, have you checked out Nier: Automata? It's a great game with a phenomenal story, packed tightly with moments designed to make you feel like shit (in the best way possible) due to its strong characters. I highly recommend looking it up, I feel you'd enjoy it.