"The Empathy Engine" by Adam Buckley

I’m going to go somewhere weird and I hope you can follow me there. Fundamentally: writing is an exercise in empathy. By that, I mean that fiction writing, the construction of story, engages what I call the Empathy Engine, the capacity for viewer and author alike to empathize with the story’s characters in a way that creates genuine emotion. I know I'm tossing a lot of word salad here, but I feel that this gives a name to phenomena I’ve been able to see and feel yet could never properly describe. The Empathy Engine is the unseen matrix through which we interact with stories, characters, and their greater mechanics. 

I’m of the opinion that the best always consider both sides of a conflict. Of course, some of our most enduring fiction are fairy tales, ones that actively discourage this so they can instill hard, binary morality in young, impressionable minds. But by that same token, think about how many classic fables have been given new life with an anti-hero slant? Maleficent and Elphaba are modern examples, but what about Bigby Wolf of Fables, a remimaging of the Big Bad Wolf as a pulp detective? Or Once Upon a Time’s dastardly handsome Captain Hook? We can’t help but have sympathy for the devil. We know that stories don’t work without it. The Empathy Engine isn’t limitless, however. We feel it gutter out when a character goes beyond the pale, or when they’re undeserving of that oh-so-common redemption arc everyone’s getting these days. 

This’ll sound bad, even downright sociopathic, but empathy is a finite resource for the author to exploit. You already did it when you drew the line in the sand that marked who was “good” and who was “bad.” Not every story is so binary, but even the most morally complex stories have their heroes. Cutting off the empathy supply is how we know who the villain is, how we shape the statement of the story we’re trying to tell. That's not to say you can’t have sympathy for the devil, in fact, that makes the drama even juicier, but in the end, one force must prevail over the other. Give every character too much grace and you run the risk of not saying much of anything at all. 

The Engine doesn’t stop at fictional characters, but extends into the author’s ability to empathize with real people. Inevitably, you will have to write a character that has life experience you do not, and it's your responsibility to depict that experience as truthfully as possible. At that point, research and speaking with others is how you get the job done. Art has the capacity to send our Empathy Engine into overdrive, to not just empathize with fictional characters, but to then take that and transfer it to the real world, to change hearts and minds in ways that regular life cannot. In this way, the Empathy Engine works for both writer and reader. 

You might be asking, “How is this any different than regular human empathy?” In truth? It's not. That’s the trick. Sure, in fiction, you definitely know if a character has remorse, if they can truly change for the better, and in real life, it's not so easy, but the means to get there is the same. Imagine if we could pull the ripcord on our Empathy Engines in real life as easily as we do it in fiction. What would the world look like then?