Sympathy and Empathy

[dr_mabeuse]

I recently read an excellent little story by sheath entitled "Laundry Day Surprise". It's a simple recounting of a woman at home doing laundry who's accosted by a Mysterious Stranger who has sex with her and then leaves without her ever seeing his face.

It's very well done, but what caught me as an author was how deftly sheath handled what I see as the big difficulty in a story like this: dealing with the woman's fear and dismay at being assaulted by a stranger.

She handles it by letting the woman's sexual excitement carry us right past that point of reasonable objection. We--or I at least--suspend disbelief because I'm caught up in the woman's excitement. Yes, I did think that it would never happen like this, that rape is a heinous crime and all that, but still the feeling that it wasn't realistic didn't make me want to stop reading. It was a fantasy and it worked as such.

I write a lot of reluctant sex stuff, some from the male first-person POV, and I started looking at how I got around the same problems: that of making the sexually aggressive narrator if not appealing, than at least not actually repulsive to the reader, and what I think I found is this:

If the character's feelings are described rather than his rational thoughts, we can empathize with him or her and even suspend disbelief. But if we try to explain or rationalize the characters actions, we risk making the character very unappealing and even losing the reader, who may no longer be willing to withhold disbelief or moral judgment. It seems to me that readers will empathize, but they won't necessarily sympathize

This made me start noticing whether authors concentrate on the emotional or rational side of things in their stories. I come down squarely in the emotional camp. In fact, I believe in a thing called emotional logic, which holds that if something feels right in a piece of art, it is right, whether it makes rational sense or not. So I'm wondering: do you write from the head or the heart? Do things have to make logical sense or just emotional sense?


---dr.M.

 

[TheEarl]

I write from the head, because that's the kind of guy I am. Everything has to make logical sense to me and I like following trains of thought.

Dr M: How do you describe feelings? I've never really thought of doing this in my stories and am not sure how you'd go about it without telling. Can you give an example?

The Earl

 

[Quasimodem]

. . . do you write from the head or the heart? Do things have to make logical sense or just emotional sense?

---dr.M.

I write from the funny bone, but that aside, have you ever read John Fowles’ "The Collector."

This is a story in two parts, both first person pov, one part from the collecter's pov, the other from the collected's pov. A neater division of just what you are discussing, you could not hope to find.

If you can remember only the film adaptation, that is not the book. The film could never fully get inside either protagonist's head.

And that consummate performance of the difference between head and heart, remorseless observation, empathetic discovery, and the failure of one character to achieve any sympathetic reflections, are what most raises the novel to achieve it's share of greatness.

 

[English Lady]

Oh i so agree Dr M!You've hit the nail on the head! If it makes sense in my heart it doesn't matter how really unbelieveable it is because i'll get carried away in the emotion!

I write from my heart, its emotion,conflict and passion all the way within my tales and i could never write any other way. My heart rules in everything I do, especially my writing and also my reading..

 

[Alex756]

Dr M: How do you describe feelings? I've never really thought of doing this in my stories and am not sure how you'd go about it without telling. Can you give an example?

The Earl

Let me counter this ....

Why does it have to be done without 'telling' I mean 'telling' does not equal 'telling badly'.

Sorry my pet peeve of the week is show don't tell when personally my text doesn't get up and mine, it tells what is going on.

I think especially in erotica feelings are very important. However this might give me an aswer as to why women in general like a sotry I wrote and men don't -- they find the character perplexing.
I know everyone is differant don't make gender specification but I think its true.

I think skillful 'telling' is all we have and that no one ever -shows- anyone anything. Its like the 18th century British natural philosopher that walked in and told a class to 'observe' They dodn't know what to do, they needed some guidence as to what to observe. Its in that same way a sotry teller doesn't tell EVERYTHING, they tell what they want the reader to know, thats all. The reader may think they reached this concusio on their own that so and so was scared, but they were told .. just the level of grace in the telling is at question.

yet another Alex
Alex756

 

[*Catbabe*]

dr. M.
For me, characters and the story that surrounds them have to appeal to my emotions and feeling first for a story to work. As long as there are no ridiculous leaps of faith required of the logical side of my brain, the emotional side of the story will keep me captivated and if it's a good story even begin to affect me physically. That is, I will share the emotions of the characters by feeling nervous, afraid or aroused, depending on the action.

This is what I look for as a reader and so therefore, that is how I try to write.


Alex,
I would agree with your point that a reader is always being directed by the author in some way, but I think the amount of direction is what is important.

I think that the point about showing versus telling is all about being subtle and allowing the reader to have some freedom to bring their own experiences/emotions to the story. The more you require the reader to be a part of the story, the more engaged they will be and hopefully, the more they will enjoy your story.

Cat

 

[gauchecritic]

I think this probably has a bearing on the 'dependance' thing, you know; mother and baby, jailer and prisoner, abductor and hostage et,c. This reasoning may get a bit iffy here.

Assuming that the story is written in a style we like and we want to read it, then the author has established a relationship with the reader, he/she is in charge of our comfort and sustenance.

Communication takes that relationship a step further and a bit deeper.

The kind of communication will enhance the relationship eg "Here's your bread and water" or "I've brought you some food but all I could find was some bread and a little water".

I imagine the first terse sentence to be a writer giving only the story and facts. The second lets us into the characters make-up and motivations.

So we want our 'captors' to treat us gently and with rapport. The closer our relationship, the more sustaining our 'food'.

Simplistic and without an ounce of evidence. Possibly not even anything to do with the thread. That's what Sunday mornings do for you.

Gauche

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I write from the head, because that's the kind of guy I am. Everything has to make logical sense to me and I like following trains of thought.

Dr M: How do you describe feelings? I've never really thought of doing this in my stories and am not sure how you'd go about it without telling. Can you give an example?

The Earl

We're talking about a couple of different things here. at once. I didn't mean to get involved with the old "show don't tell" shibboleth. Like most of the "rules" of writing, it's really a suggestion more than any sort of rulke. It's violated all the time in excellent stories. In fact, the more action there is in a story, the more it must be told rather than showed. All myths, all sagas, all fairy tales are told and not shown, and that works fine for them.

In fact, there was a French avant garde novelistic movement back when I was in school called (I think) conrete realism that held that the author is only entitled to describe action observable to an outside observer. Their books were exhaustingly meticiulous descriptions of every action, every observable detail, and they were totally unreadable, as avant garde novels so often are. (Alain Robbe-Grillet, one its main proponents, wrote an extremely long story about a man having to go back home and put on deoderant, including a description of every detail in the process. No one read it, I'm sure) This was showing-not-telling carried to absurd extremes.



But what I was talking about was the idea that what the reader responds to is a acharacter's feelings and emotions rather than their logical reasons for their actions. By "describing feelings" I merely meant telling the reader what the character was feeling.

You see a lot of stories here that are basically descriptions of sex, and one of the things that make them all so dreary is that the authors don't bother to tell us much of what the characters are feeling.

I wrote a story about a woman having sex in a museum and being transported into an ancient Egyptian fertility rite, combining sex and religion. There was no way I was going to get this to work by making it rational. It made no rational sense. But by dealing with the whole thing through her emotions, I think I got it to work. It made a kind of emotional sense.


---dr.M.