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About Me
Sympathy is often given little more than a passing nod by the authors of how-to-write-fiction books. Gaining the reader's sympathy
for your characters is crucial to inducing the fictive dream, and if
you don't effectively induce the fictive dream, you haven't written
a damn good novel.
Sympathy is a frequently misunderstood concept. Some howto-write-fiction authors have made a pseudo-rule that says that for
a reader to have sympathy for a character, the character must be
admirable. This is patently not true. Most readers have a lot of sympathy for a character like, say, Defoe's Moll Flanders, or Dickens's
Fagin in Oliver Twist, or Long John Silver in Stevenson's Treasure
Island. Yet these characters are not admirable in the least. Moll Flanders is a liar, a thief, and a bigamist; Fagin corrupts youth; and Long
John Silver is a rascal, a cheat, and a pirate.
A few years ago there was a film called Raging Bull about
former middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta. The character
in the film beat his wife, then divorced her when he started to succeed in the ring. He seduced girls who were not of legal age, had a
violent temper fueled by paranoia, and spoke in grunts. He was a
total savage in the ring and on the street. Yet the character of
LaMotta, played by Robert De Niro in the film, garnered a great
deal of audience sympathy.
How was this miracle accomplished?
Jake LaMotta at the start of the film was living in ignorance,
degradation, and poverty, and the audience felt sorry for him. This
is the key: To gain the sympathy of your reader, make the reader
feel sorry for the character. In Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, as an
example, Jean Valjean is introduced to the reader as he arrives wearily at a town and goes to the inn to eat. Although he has money, he
is refused service. He is starving. The reader must feel sorry for this
hapless man, no matter what dreadful crime he may have committed.
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