 Drama: March 09, 2016 Issue [#7496] |
  Drama
This week: Making Readers Feel for Your Characters Edited by: Joy  
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“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view -- until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.”
Bram Stoker, Dracula
“Sir,' I interrupted him, 'you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you speak of her with hate --- with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel --- she cannot help being mad.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is on the literary mode of magical realism.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
Note: In the editorial, I refer to third person singular as he, to also mean the female gender, because I don't like to use they or he/she. |
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Two ways for our readers to establish a bond with our characters are: empathy and sympathy. These two words have become mixed with each other in popular understanding, but in writing fiction, they are separate. This is because the word empathy was coined much later, about the last century and a half ago, whereas the word sympathy existed forever.
A reader feeling empathy for a character may say, “I feel what he feels. I feel his pain.” Empathy may also have a cognitive element or an ‘ahha!’ moment, especially when the reader himself has experienced the same difficulties or joys of the fictional character.
Empathy can be emotional and cerebral. This means one can understand another person’s pain or feel it as if it were his own. Most anyone feels emotional empathy, except psychopaths. Psychopaths cannot feel other people’s feelings, although they may be able to understand, identify, and use them to their own advantage exceptionally well. This is a point to remember when we are creating our psychopathic characters.
The importance of empathy lies in the fact that it may be one of the factors in evoking sympathy in the reader. A reader showing sympathy for a character may say, “I am on his side by supporting him and his journey in this story. I pity or admire him and want him to succeed.” The reader may want this character to succeed or fail just because the plot has captured his imagination. This may also be because the reader has found the character interesting enough so he wants to know the outcome of this character’s story.
This wish for a character’s success is even more important than empathy, especially because, when the going gets tough, the character’s failure or hardships will mean more to the reader. Sympathy in the reader can be aroused by putting the character in jeopardy, giving him physical and mental hardships and other misfortunes, keeping him defenseless and vulnerable, or making him an underdog.
When we want our readers to feel for our characters, we can employ several approaches, separately or together. These are:
 Showing the external emotions of the character through body language
Writing the story from the character’s point of view, so he can reveal his feelings. This is one way to get inside a character’s head and heart effectively.
Letting other characters point out, respond, and share the lead character’s feelings
Making the trauma or the core wound much deeper than the other possible flaws in the main character
Making all characters interesting enough with good sides and flaws together, but concentrating more so on the lead characters
When we writers can succeed to create emotional bonds between the characters and the readers, our stories gain additional depth no matter what their plots are. For this, both empathy and sympathy are crucial to our storytelling.
Until next time! 
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This Issue's Tip:
Sacrifice:
The main character's sacrifice can happen in two ways. One has to do with his moral courage when he sacrifices his goal. The other has to do with his physical courage when the sacrifices his safety. Some very successful stories show both of these together./b}
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Feedback for "Painting with Winning Words"
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Osirantinsel 
Thanks for a great NL, Joy. I struggle with writing visual descriptions (I'm the one that would have gone with the Apollo line above!!) so I try very hard to add more depth where I can. I'm not sure I'm always successful at it. And I agree with your last comments - too much description and I'm skipping pages. You don't need to paint the whole picture; the reader likes to use their own 'sight' too.
Thank you. 
I don't like too much description in big blocks of exposition either.
And:
"I try very hard to add more depth where I can"
It shows in your work. Write on!
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Mia - craving colour 
Hi Joy,
It's fabulous to see what can be done with the right kind of descriptors, drawing the reader in with a celebration of imagery. Beautiful examples.
Thanks, Mia.
That kind of imagery must take a lot of experience and several revisions, I think.
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