How To Write Good: A Lightly Salted Guide to Stepping Up Your Wattpad Game.

Cry With Me

I want to begin with empathy because it's the fundamental means of connecting with anything in life, not just characters.

Empathy is the ability to feel what someone else feels, and when you establish that sort of bond between the reader and a character in your book, your ability to manipulate that reader's emotions skyrockets, and they have a sudden interest in the future of the character, and by association, the story you're trying to tell.

How do we build empathy? I'm so glad you asked!

This ties into a number of scientific fields from psychology to neurology to neurochemistry and beyond, so I won't tell you it's easy, but because the human brain is both lazy and stupid, it takes shortcuts wherever it can and that's where we can insert all sorts of influence. Here is a handful of very broad truths that you can consider when constructing your character.

We like what is like us.

To many people in Western culture, this is not a popular truth, but the fact is we are hard-wired for it. When something is similar to us, our minds have immediate access to a large database of facts and assumptions so we don't have to spend a lot of time and energy creating new associations. This is why things like knitting circles and book clubs exist.

I don't mean you need to homogenize your protagonist (or any of your characters) to be just like the majority audience, but it does mean you should find things that most people can immediately relate to: faults (this is a big one), goals, weaknesses, interests; just don't heap everything into one character.

One advantage is that you can create both literal and subjective hooks, since it doesn't apply only to who and what we are but also who and what we aspire to. It's why superheroes are popular, even though few of us have the experience of flying without the assistance of a hollow metal tube full of highly explosive jet fuel.

The opposite is also true. While we can easily imagine ourselves as a hero, because brains are both stupid and lazy we are also inclined to blame our problems on other people, which contributes to making the underdog among the most popular characters in literature.

We like to belong.

Let's say we meet a character named Angvar. This happy-go-lucky Viking is everything we want to be, and we've begun to write his name on textbook covers surrounded by little hearts. Angvar meets Hildeborg and there's an instant spark. We feel that spark too, and because we are social animals who are easily influenced, Angvar's preferences become our own so Hildeborg ends up on the nice list, even if she secretly practices her archery skills on helpless guinea pigs in her spare time, solely because she likes the way they squeal. We might even find it cute.

A week later, Angvar runs into Snorri. Literally runs into him. The two begin to fight, and Snorri wins, breaking Angvar's nose and knocking out a couple of teeth, laughing while our hero tries to haul himself to his feet. We don't like Snorri. We wish all and only bad things on Snorri from now until the end of time. We never get to see Snorri when he visits nursing homes to sing nostalgic ballads to the sick and elderly residents.

Why? Because we've seen something in Angvar that reminds us of who we are or who we want to be, and once we've made that commitment, we want to justify it. We want Angvar and his circle of friends to like us, because being a member of the inner circle, right or wrong, fulfills a deep, personal need. It's not something we decide, it's built right into our neural networks and reinforced by social behavior.

This principle doesn't run in only one direction. We will also like Angvar more as we encounter relatable characters who like him. Even if all we know of Angvar is through these relationships, once we see other people liking someone, we're more inclined to like them even if we're given no further reason to invest ourselves in the character.

We like affirmation.

People will automatically gravitate toward nice characters, not because they can always directly empathize with them but because they can identify and appreciate the empathy shared within their interactions.

There's a book on screenwriting by author Blake Snyder called, "Save the Cat," named after a Hollywood truism which states, "if you want people to like a character, they need to rescue a cat, and if you want them to hate a character, they should kick a dog." It reinforces a general sense of morality without relying on complicated justifications, and that affirms the reader's sense of right vs. wrong. This idea directly connects with the point above, specifically because we tend to see ourselves as the good guy, and when someone does something we approve of, our affection toward them instantly improves.

Wrapping it up

This might sound like a cynical outlook on life, but it's not meant that way. Ok, maybe a little bit. This isn't a comprehensive review of Empathy, why and how it works, and all those other interesting tidbits that would round out your knowledge, it's just a very high-level look at some of the biggest things that help readers connect. We like people who are like us, we like people who are nice, and we like people who are liked by others. Keep these in mind as you progress through the next chapters.