A common criticism that comes up in writing workshops is that a particular character isn’t “sympathetic.”

I once had a student who seemed pleased with this response. “You’re not supposed to like him,” she said.

Her character was the stereotypical bad husband; Tucker cheated on his wife, Gina, and to make matters worse, had initiated the affair during the months Gina was recovering from a crippling auto accident.

Now at face value, there’s nothing sympathetic or remotely likable about this guy.

But when readers yearn for sympathy, what they’re really after is connection. After all, we don’t necessarily have to like a character. We don’t even have to feel sorry for him. We just need to understand him.

Compassion

Junot Diaz once said that his growth as a writer was commensurate with his ability to become a more compassionate human being. In my view, compassion is an essential quality for writers to cultivate.

But summoning compassion can be a challenge, especially when writing about people who have harmed us in some way. Even characters wholly invented can suffer from our own pre-conceived notions.

I’m not suggesting you abandon your feelings about your characters. Just don’t be enslaved by them. Because here’s the thing:

Our feelings about our characters, however justified those feelings may be, often get in our way, presenting only a limited number of characteristics and circumstances that satisfy those emotions. If we’re going to create our best work, we need to seek the humanity in our characters. Including our oppressors.

To quote my wise teacher, Larry Sutin, “Love your villains.”

1. Start From the Premise That Most People Are Basically Good

They’re just flawed. Often fatally.

Even the best of us have imperfections. And the most troublesome people, if observed long enough and from enough angles, have traits we can identify with, admire, even root for.

The truth is, good people do bad things. And bad people do good things. In our weakest moments, all of us are capable of making immoral choices.

2. Explore Your Character’s Desire

Desire is the one thing we can understand even when the action taken to satisfy that desire is beyond our comprehension. We can’t fathom a woman killing her baby, but we can sympathize with her desire to save him from a life of slavery, as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We can’t condone a man covering up the evidence of a fatal hit and run accident, but we can understand a father’s desire to protect his daughter, as in Andre Dubus’ “A Father’s Story.”

Readers aren’t just interested in what characters do. They’re interested in why. Don’t just focus on surface events. Probe what’s underneath.

3. Tap Into Your Own Impulses

Many great actors say that when they play the role of a villain — a killer, let’s say — they’re pulling some shadow aspect of themselves.

The thing is, as unconscionable as our characters’ actions may be, we often have the very same impulses. We’ve just learned to suppress them. And here’s the great thing about our literary counterparts: they have full permission to act out the things we may want to do, the things we may fantasize about doing, but would never do.

My mentor Diane Lefer once said, “We all have a killer inside. We all have a saint inside. We have everything big and everything small.”

4. Interview Your Character

If you ask the right questions, they will have plenty to say to you. Some questions you might ask:

What are you most afraid of?
What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?
What do you want?
What’s keeping you from getting it?
What could they do to you?
What would you do to get what you want?
What are you willing to give up?
What hurt you so much in your life that you need to hurt others in order to heal?

5. Reveal a Chink in the Armor

If you present the stock villain devoid of human frailty, we’ll have a stock reaction to your story. Said another way, we won’t care.

Back to Tucker:

When my student dug deeper, she discovered that underneath Tucker’s infidelity, there was a lonely husband grieving his wife’s absence. It wasn’t novelty he was after. It was intimacy. Once this writer tapped into her character’s desperation, she was able to imbue him with vulnerability, to catch him in odd moments when his humanity slipped through the cracks.

We then had a very different reaction. I can’t say we liked Tucker. And we certainly didn’t applaud his affair. But we did feel enormous compassion and understanding.

What about you?

How do you find humanity in your characters?
What fictional or non-fictional characters have you sympathized with? Why?

Share your insights below.

A real writer thrives, not from raw talent alone, or a list of publishing credits, but from an inner-directed mindset.

As a real writer you:

Refrain From Self-Sabotaging Thoughts

My novel’s still unpublished.
I should be doing something more productive like cleaning the kitchen or doing the laundry.
My story sucks.
It should be easier than this.
I’ll never write like him/her.
I’m just not that talented.

Such thoughts are a form of self-censure. Although we are not our thoughts, we believe them as fact. And what we believe we manifest. So next time, instead of describing yourself as an unpublished writer, instead of regarding yourself unworthy even to call yourself a writer, present yourself straight up. Say, “I’m a writer.” Or, “I’m writing my memoir.” Our thoughts and what we manifest are entirely our choice.

Focus On What Your Work Needs

Your work needs for you to dive in deeper, to listen to what your story is telling you about what it wants to become. It needs for you to explore not only what you’re writing about, but why. Real writers don’t wallow in self doubt. They don’t spend time hoping everyone will love their story. They don’t agonize over what their mother might think. They don’t even worry about whether or not they’ll publish. They’re too busy writing.

Don’t Let the Invisible Hand of the Market Shape Your Work

Sometimes writers will craft a story with a certain publication or audience in mind, restricting it to a certain word count or topic. Or they’ll write a memoir because they believe it will sell better than a work of fiction. Here’s the thing: whenever we write to fulfill others’ expectations, we create our most mediocre work. Remember why you write in the first place – to discover what you didn’t know you knew –about life, about others, about yourself and your place in the world. Follow your curiosity and obsessions, the memories and life mysteries that refuse to let you go. Trust in the universality of those concerns. Your audience will find you.

Embrace Failure

Your story, novel of memoir might not be its best version of itself in its current stage of development. That’s okay. Keep at it. You’ll get there. The results you have right now are in no way a reflection of your potential, which is boundless. Even if you’ve written an unsuccessful story or novel, learn from it. Here’s your chance to grow. As Samuel Beckett said, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Know That Writing is Rewriting

Raymond Carver wrote as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story before he considered it done. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote several versions of The Great Gatsby before it became a masterpiece. A great piece of fiction or non-fiction is layered and complex. There’s a profusion of things to concern yourself with and the mind can only focus on so many of those concerns at any given time. Rewriting allows you to deepen, refine and crystallize your raw material. And when you know how to navigate it – a topic I’ll be addressing later – rewriting is immensely gratifying. And a helluva lot of fun.

Love the Journey, Not Just the Destination

If your primary gaze is on the endgame, be it publication, adoration, fame, or commercial success, you not only deprive yourself of the exquisite pleasures of writing, you shortchange the necessary stages you need to grow. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to publish or to get paid for your work. But if you live for the day-to-day, moment-to-moment act of writing itself, rather than just those apexes along the way, your work and your relationship to your work will be all the richer, all the more rewarding. You’re also more likely to get published.

Nurture Your Genius

There’s a misconception that, in order to be brilliant at something, you need to be blessed with innate remarkable talent. Not so, according to Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success. Gladwell, who studied the most successful musicians, composers, artists and athletes in history, reports that the difference between success and non-success, between genius and mediocrity is 10,000 hours. That’s right. Anyone from Jimi Hendrix to Bill Gates to Hemingway who has succeeded has done so on the back of at least 10,000 hours.

Talent only takes you so far. I think it’s irrelevant in terms of your work’s potential. In order to master your craft, to write the best book you possibly can, you need to log in an enormous amount of time and practice. You don’t get to cut a deal. Brilliance isn’t something you’re born with, it’s cultivated.

What have I left out? What winning attitudes do you bring to your writing practice? Leave a comment here and let me know.

But when writers overuse flashback, readers grow impatient, losing interest in, or even forgetting, what’s happening in the now of the story. Yes, we should explore our story’s past. But at some point in revision, we need to reign the past in, selecting and shaping only those episodes that are crucial to understanding the present.

An effective flashback can:

Deepen Our Understanding Of A Character
In his classic novel Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates brings us back to a particular day in Frank Wheeler’s childhood when he accompanied his father to work. As he steps inside his father’s world, young Frank experiences a range of sensations: thrill in the bustle of New York City and the novelty of wearing his first suit and tie, a “shiver of wonder” as he gazes up at the building where his father works, pleasure in seeing his own dignified reflection in the barber shop window, dread as he rides the elevator that gives “no sense of flight, but only of confinement and nausea” and repulsion as he eats lunch with his father’s overweight boss whose mouth is “clinging and trembling with spittle.”

This flashback is significant because it contains the conflicting emotions that plague Frank Wheeler as the novel presses forward. It dramatizes the evolving struggle between his desire to break free from the job he despises and his impulse to stay.

Lend Later Scenes Dramatic Power
Early in Revolutionary Road, Frank Wheeler recalls a time his wife had told him about a particular morning at school “…when a menstrual flow of unusual suddenness and volume had taken her by surprise in the middle of a class.” He imagines how she must have run from the room “with a red stain the size of a maple leaf on the seat of her white linen skirt.”

This flashback is reflected back to us at the novel’s end when April Wheeler induces an abortion. And while Yates spares us the gory details of the abortion itself, the earlier image of blood flow, of the red stain spreading on her white skirt, resonates in our mindscape.

Bear The Story’s Meaning
Most of Said Sayrafiezadeh’s non-fiction story “The Afflicted” takes place in the present as the narrator and his girlfriend wait in the hospital ER for her wounded finger to be sutured. But the emotional movement happens as he confronts his painful childhood.

While observing a five-year-old boy who “appears far too comfortable and familiar with being in the emergency waiting room,” he leaps years back in time to a day when he was knocked unconscious after falling off his tricycle. “My father had left home long ago,” he tell us, “but my nine-year-old sister was still living with us and when I came to, she was sitting beside me.”

Having established his father’s absence early on, each visit into the past then gathers meaning, bringing us closer and closer to the emotional core. Three pages later, he gives us this:

The Andy Griffith Show is on television now. When I was child, it came on right before suppertime and I would watch it imagining that I was Opie, and that Andy was my dad, and that we lived in Mayberry and went fishing together. And then my real-life mother would break this reverie by calling me to dinner, and I would sit down with her at our fatherless table and eat a pathetic meal of frozen peas and carrots and Uncle Ben’s rice. I would spread the concoction evenly over my plate and pretend it was a pie. Then I would eat a slice of it and reshape it again, filling in the missing wedge.

The narrator’s past attempt to reshape his imaginary pie, to fill in the missing wedge, reflects the emotional void that haunts him in the present. This need to reconcile the deficits of his childhood with the yearning of his adult self is illuminated at the story’s end, when past and present converge:

I take my girlfriend’s good hand as the doctor prepares to sew. One day maybe, sometime in the future, if all works out okay, I will ask my girlfriend to marry me, and I will one day find myself sitting beside her in a hospital room, holding her hand as she prepares to deliver our baby. I will surmount the misery of my childhood and become the father I never had. I will invent it out of thin air.

Launch From The Present Moment By A Significant And Related Incident Or Image
In “The Afflicted” it is the wounded little boy in the emergency waiting room and later, a classic TV sitcom about a father and son. In Revolutionary Road it is a walk down an empty school corridor after April’s failed performance in an amateur play, and the hint of their troubled marriage.

Ideally, the image or episode in the flashback then launches itself back into the present story, adding drama and weight to the narrative. After lingering on the school day in April’s past, here’s how Yates returns us to the present:

Her face must have looked almost exactly the way it did now, as they opened this other fire-exit door and walked out across these other school grounds not many miles from Rye, and her way of walking must have been similar too.

When a story uses flashback effectively, the past and the present speak to each other, answering each other’s narrative questions and posing new ones.

These are my thoughts on a few ways to get the greatest payoff from flashback. What are yours?

Looking forward to your insights.

Recently an aspiring novelist told me she would never feel successful unless she published a bestseller.

I replied that book sales have little, if anything, to do with literary achievement. After all, if making the bestseller list is the chief barometer of a writer’s success then Jackie Collins and Victoria Gotti are outrageously successful. I have yet to meet anyone who aspires to write like them.

But this writer insisted on validation. If she didn’t publish, it could only mean that years of work on her novel had been wasted — that she had failed.

Comments like these both sadden and frustrate me because they entirely disregard the writer’s experience of doing the work. They only concern results.

The way I see it, there’s a difference between wanting to be a writer and truly wanting to write. If you’re a real and serious writer, you’re dedicated to the work for the sheer joy of doing it. If you publish, great. If not, well, maybe in due time. In the interim you have this wonderful thing you love to do every day. Real writers are enthralled with the process. They write to uncover life’s hidden truths, to discover things they didn’t know they knew–about themselves, about people, about life.

To paraphrase something Jane Smiley once said, if you deeply immerse yourself in your work, if you fall in love with your craft, you will gain two major boons: first, your work will get better, and so will be more likely to get published. Second, your relationship to the work itself and to the process will become so strong that you will care less and less about whether it ever gets published.

I’m not saying that getting published isn’t a great achievement. It certainly is. But a work of fiction or memoir will fail or succeed on its own terms. Whether it sells, or how well it sells, has little correlation to quality. In the end it’s your satisfaction with the work that determines its success.

That’s my take on success. What’s yours?

Recently I stumbled across an article offering advice about how to go from initial idea to story. This author’s prescription for creating compelling fiction? First, outline. Know your beginning, middle, and end. Create character sketches with a list of physical features and personality traits. Next, map out the story’s events. Think of your story as a race, with your protagonist wanting to get to the finish line. Now choose a setting. Got it? Now you’re ready to write.

While I wholeheartedly disagree with this advice, I understand the desire to plot out a narrative, however loosely, before writing the first draft. Let’s face it — first drafts can be scary; all this meandering, getting lost in a maze of possibilities, images and associations, detouring through what feel like unwieldy episodes and characters. An outline provides a blueprint. It’s safe, known territory. It would seem then that knowing where our narrative is going before we write should produce our best stories.

Not so.

Why? Because writing is largely an unconscious process. We never know what we’re going to say until we start writing. Even if you do have an idea at the outset of where your story is headed, it helps to stay open to what your story is telling you about what it’s trying to become. Maybe a minor character takes on a life of his or her own, spinning the story in a completely unexpected direction. Or you discover after several revisions that you’re really probing your relationship with your mother, not your father. If you coerce your characters into doing things that merely satisfy plot, if you pour your story into a preconceived template, the result is likely to be relatively shallow prose that’s not satisfying to you or your readers.

I’m not saying to abandon structure. Structure is essential. It shapes our prose so that a reader can receive it. But premature focus on it can stifle your voice. It can disturb the intuitive flow, the discovery or sublime truth that both reader and writer seemingly arrive at together. As Robert Frost famously said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

I suggest that rather than begin with an outline, write exploratory drafts. Dive in. Don’t know where you’re going. Structure is an evolving process. As you dive deeper and deeper into your material, as you inhabit your story and your characters through successive re-envisioning, you begin to see patterns and connections; you see a shape emerge. That’s when structure becomes useful.

Writing is a discovery of what we didn’t know was in us. This freefall approach might feel scary at first, but ultimately your voice will let loose. And your work will be richer and more rewarding. Narrative voice and, by extension, our stories, can only flourish if we stay open and, to a certain degree, lose control.