How to write: empathise

 So how do you find a great story? It’s like finding a needle in a haystack and sometimes it’s right under your nose and you don’t see it.

Everyone has their own way of finding a story. This is what sometimes works for me: you invent some vibrant and believable characters. 

Who might this character be by the sea in Wales? You decide!

You ask your main character what he or she wants more than anything else in the world, and then you ask your other main character what it is that he or she wants more than anything else in the world. And there you have your conflict, which is an essential ingredient in every single story ever listened to around a fire (in the days of cave men or women) or published in a book.

One character might want desperately to kill her mother-in-law because she knows her life will be so much better without her in it. The other character might be the detective who’s never solved a single case and who wants more than anything to prove to the world that he’s worth his salt.

But the murderer doesn’t want to get caught. She wants to live her blissful life, free of the mother-in-law. The detective is determined to catch the killer, or his girlfriend will leave him, he’ll lose his job and he’ll end up living under a bridge.

Characters really do come alive if they have strong motives. They might be understated ones, like not wanting to be lonely, or powerful ones, like wanting to take over a kingdom.

I bet all of you pictured the murderer and the detective in your mind while I talked about them just then. Even though I just sketched them, your imagination would have turned them into human beings. I’m suggesting this because I want to point out that motive is vital in creating a character. The way a character looks is a lot less important because the reader can fill that bit in.

All of us, because we’re human, love listening to or reading stories about other humans, or characters. It’s part of our DNA. Evolutionary biologists believe humans are the successful species we are because we’re able to empathise with each other. We care for each other when someone’s sick, we praise each other when someone’s done a good job, we laugh with our friends over a joke.

If we didn’t have the ability to empathise, we wouldn’t have been able to form cooperative societies with hospitals and traffic lights and universities and a robot exploring Mars. Stories told around that pre-historic campfire were born out of our need to empathise and bond with each other.  

If you can create at least two characters that you really care about, your readers will care about them too. If you really want one of them to overcome the setbacks and obstacles that you throw at them, then so will your readers. And if you want another of them to get his or her come-uppance, then so will your readers.

Write the story you want to read. Write for you. Make characters you want to spend time with – or characters you want to destroy in as grisly a way as possible.

I believe that very strong characters with conflicting motives drive the plot. The Booker Prize-winning novelist A.S Byatt said that she creates a novel by starting with two couples, as D.H. Lawrence did.

You can immediately see the potential for conflict, crisis and confrontation here. Two couples on a camping trip. One couple was allocated the task of bringing the fresh water and they forget. Or: two couples on a camping trip. One member of each couple are friends. The other two don’t know each other. There is undeniable attraction or hatred between them. The possibilities are endless.

But if you’re a bit stuck with your strong characters and don’t know what else to do with them apart from having them go head-to-head with their opposing motivations, read a newspaper, go to a movie, eavesdrop on a conversation and ask yourself: what if?

What if, in the newspaper article, the foreign aid worker who was freed after being held in Tripoli for three days was actually a spy? What if she was pregnant by her secret lover, a Libyan terrorist? What if, in the movie, there was a hotel in India and that, instead of elderly Brits as in the film, it was occupied by young Aussies? What if, in the overheard conversation, the guy lost his job and instead of sinking into a depression signed up for the space program?

Have fun inventing some hot-blooded characters of your own!