100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 2)

40) Resonance and Sympathy

I've been thinking about this post for some time now. (And if you're working according to the Coming Up list, you might recognize this as being the post on Likeable and Relateable Characters.) 

Then, I also wrote about Relateable Characters in Part 1 Section 13. That section had more to do with creating tension, though. Today, I want to look at the same subject as a topic in its own right. 

See, I've been seeing a lot of new writers asking about this when it comes to characterization, so I thought it could take me writing about it again. (But please do read Section 13, since I'm not going to repeat the same things.) 

The questions I keep seeing revolve around the same topic: I have a nice character. He/she is just the right balance of good and bad, so that the reader should like the character. It's just that...readers don't seem to connect. How do I make my character likeable? 

Sound familiar? 

In that case, prepare yourself to have your mind blown. 

Readers connecting with a character actually has very little to do with how likeable that character might be. 

No, my dear reader. In reality, it all comes down to resonance. 

But what is resonance?

Let me give you a little crash course in piano tuning. When your piano is out of key, you probably can't tune it yourself. You will have to get a professional piano tuner to do it. Now, I might be wrong, but I don't think the way they tune has really changed from the way they've always done it. 

And how they've always done it is this: 

They open the piano so they can see the strings inside. Then they hit a tuning fork that vibrates at the same pitch as they key they're trying to tune. They keep tuning that key until its wire resonates with the tuning fork's frequency. 

In layman's terms: As soon as the tuner hits the tuning fork, the corresponding key's wire will vibrate on its own without the key being touched. 

Good writers make this happen too. Except our tuning forks are our stories. And the piano wire is the reader's soul. 

Yes. Take a breath. Read it again. 

I am indeed saying that we can and do touch the souls of people we don't even get to meet. Awesome to think about it that way, don't you think? 

In fact, the only non-musical equivalent (and I used music because that touches souls too) is when you meet someone and you just immediately feel like that person is or should be your friend. 

In a sense, a story is exactly the same. From the moment the reader opens that story, they should be building a relationship with it. Sometimes, this can be done with narration, but one of the easiest (yet at the same time hardest) ways I've found to do this is through the main characters. 

To explain why this works, I want you to think of it this way. Good or bad, the most profound relationships we have are with people that make us feel something. 

This something can be empathy because you've been in the same place emotionally. Or it could be deep, almost soul-destroying hatred. But you almost immediately form a bond with someone if you share a hatred of someone else with that person. Why? Because right there. Right at that moment, your souls are resonating. 

And this is why people keep reading books like Lolita. Or why we like Danny Ocean in Ocean's Eleven even though he's a thief. Because at the heart of it, the writer convinced or even tricked the reader into resonating with the character. 

The closer the point of view, the easier this is to do because there are fewer boundaries between the reader and the character. 

The hard part is this:

There's telling a reader what a character feels. 

There's showing a reader what the character feels. 

And then there's making the reader feel EXACTLY the same way. 

This is why show don't tell is so important. This is why voice is vital. It's all about making a scene such a visceral experience that the reader feels it as if they're part of it. Not viewing from the sidelines. In it. At the point of screaming out in pain because of some hurt inflicted on your character. Or as furious as the main character because of a slight. Or crying because the character is hurt, tired, and miserable. 

This is where sympathy comes from. Not "showing" the miserable scene. You can kill a main character's family and his dog and it won't make the character sympathetic. 

Have that character mourn so deeply that it makes the reader sad too... That's where your true sympathy lies. 

How does one do this? 

There's this quote (which googling quickly reveals that no one remembers who said it) that you've probably heard in some form if you're serious about writing: 

"Writing is easy. Just open a vein and bleed onto the page."

If you want people to resonate with a story or characters, you can't hold back. You can't let yourself be censored into saying things in ways that might be more "acceptable". 

You want to give your reader the purest, most undiluted experience of your character's feelings. In its rawest form. 

Which isn't to say "don't edit". You'll struggle to get those two words from me. 

What I'm trying to say is that you need to dig into the darkest corners of your soul. When your characters are scared/angry/hateful/arrogant/what have you, you can amplify those things from your own soul to the right amount when writing your character. And doing that is what also makes audiences resonate.

For example: Even if you've never been terrified of the same thing as your character, you can find something that you fear. And from there, you can show that fear so realistically that the reader involuntarily feels their own version of fear as well. 

The same goes for the happy parts in your story. It's just that those are generally much easier to write. There are subtleties, though. Which again is where digging in your dark side comes through. Try making a reader feel a character's uncertain joy. Or love tinged with fear. Or hope tinged by sadness. These seemingly contradictory feelings happen all the time. And once you've gotten the reader to feel them too while reading the book, you've won them over for about as long as you keep their trust. 

I hope this explain things better! Please do let me know if you have any questions about this section, or writing in general. As always, I dedicate sections to people whose questions inspired them. 

Then I just want to give a huge thank you! Part 1 is almost at 10k reads and is currently ranking #209 in Non-Fiction while Part 2 is #678 in Non-Fiction. That's right. BOTH are ranking at the same time. 

I couldn't do that without your reads, votes and comments. So thank you.

Coming up in 100 Things: 

Mixing Fantasy and Reality (MarissatheMarvelous)

Using Flashbacks (MarissatheMarvelous)

Plot vs Story (MissAuthorGrazelle)