Empathy

Your Relationship to Fictional Characters; EMPATHY

Empathy is:

the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation

Cambridge Dictionary

It's interesting to consider that,

although we are all different (as we have noted in our ME Lists),

we humans share common emotional responses,

to each other, and the world around us.

This is evident in the way that we enjoy sharing and becoming engrossed in stories,

be they in the form of books, films, music, dance, cave paintings, stand-up/observational comedy...

Please Recall Billy Connelly's Wilderbeest & Lions sketch

Please NOTE:

The things that Connelly and Kay are describing,

that we are relating to, and deriving such joy from, are

mundane things, everyday, small things

...not epic, earth shattering dramas

(sure there's 'death' but Wildebeest are a mundane, daily dietary fact of a lions life).

We can also create engaging stories about inanimate objects, let alone animals,

as long as we imbue them with human character(istics)...

Our lives comprise of banal, mundane, everyday, small things - and our responses to them.

For us to empathise with a character we have to recognise some of these things in them, and some of these things are so common, and represented so often that they become...

Cliché

To be able to prompt and lead someone else's imagination, we firstly have to know

what they will react to and how they will react.

There are some easily generated reactions and these are created by presenting audiences with very common emotional prompts, also known as 'clichés'...

Aaand...Almost Every Story in the World has 1 of 6 Basic Plots

As Kurt Vonnegut beautifully explained in 1995...all the stories it seems have already been invented and told, and science has now proven it so:

Professor Matthew Jockers at Washington State University, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. The Vermont researchers describe the six story shapes behind more than 1,700 English novels as:

1. Rags to riches – a steady rise from bad to good fortune

2. Riches to rags – a fall from good to bad, a tragedy

3. Icarus – a rise then a fall in fortune

4. Oedipus – a fall, a rise then a fall again

5. Cinderella – rise, fall, rise

6. Man in a hole – fall, rise

The researchers used sentiment analysis to get the data – a statistical technique often used by marketeers to analyse social media posts in which each word is allocated a particular ‘sentiment score’, based on crowdsourced data.

BBC - Culture

So the shape of most stories are clichés in themselves.

Kurt Vonnegut on The Shape of Stories

This short lecture by Vonnegut is inspiring, heart-warming but most importantly, tells a significant truth that is a key to honest and original writing, :

“- all life is a cliché. We don’t awaken with any sort of originality. We all live and die with three meals a day, fall in and out of love.

Nothing could be more of a cliché than a love story, and that must go on, so long as it is treated interestingly.”

Chaplin, 1966

What Makes Your Story Different,

Is What Makes You Different...

To avoid resorting to easily found prompts or clichés we need to understand other people's 'drivers', motivations;

the things that they need and want, as individuals.

We, as individuals, have different characters,

our characters are formed by a mix of our parents and ancestors genetics and the waves of their experience, learning and perspectives that have shaped our childhoods.

Remember Larkin...

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