March 13, 2025
by Lee Martin, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty
I was a shy boy who knew the discomfort that came from having people stare at my family because we were outside the norm. My mother was forty-five when I was born; my father was forty-two. I was the only child of older parents, and one of those parents—my father—had lost both of his hands in a farming accident when I was barely a year old. He wore prosthetic hands, or, as he called them, his hooks—two steel prongs curved like a question mark at the end of each of his shortened arms. I remember the way people would look at us—sometimes with fear or disgust and sometimes with curiosity—when we were out in public. We weren’t the family people expected to see. We weren’t like them. My parents were old enough to be my grandparents. My father was disabled. We simply didn’t fit into what most people thought of as “normal,” and because we didn’t, we were considered odd. I grew up knowing the feeling of being somehow “less than”—a feeling it took me years to overcome, to understand that being different may indeed mark us, but it need not define us.
This may be why I’ve always been sensitive to the importance of writers having empathy for their characters, even those who are less than admirable. Here are a few things we can do to find the right degree of empathy to make our characters memorable.
Be a matchmaker. When I was just beginning to work on my novel, River of Heaven, a novel about a closeted elderly gay man in a small Midwestern town, I was enough pages in to realize I was out of my depth. The prose was wooden, and the character was flat. I had to ask myself why he interested me. I had to know where I, a heterosexual man in my early forties, resided in that character. Maybe I’m just stubborn, but I believe we shouldn’t shy away from writing about characters very unlike ourselves. The trick is to find some part of us that we share with the character. So, I set out to see what I could discover. I opened a notebook, and I wrote, “When I think about Sam (the main character from my novel), I think of. . . .” Then I started jotting down anything that came to me—movies I’d watched, books I’d read, news articles I’d come across, people I’d known, memories. I censored nothing; I merely recorded what came to mind. In that process, I hit upon a moment—actually more than one—that caused my throat to constrict and stopped my pen from moving. Suddenly, I was back there in those moments, and I knew the emotions I was feeling were emotions that Sam might very well have felt. I’d matched myself with the character. He and I became one. I saw myself in him, and that opened the door to the empathy I felt, an empathy that would allow me to deepen his character in what I hope was an honest and authentic way.
Imagine the child. My novel, The Bright Forever, includes a character named Raymond R. Wright, a man who ends up committing a terrible crime. After the book was published, an interviewer asked me what my biggest challenge was while writing, and I said it was having to live with some of the characters—I was thinking particularly of Raymond R. Wright—for the three years it took me to write the book. I didn’t want him to be purely evil even though what he eventually did was heinous. Looking only at that aspect of his character wasn’t interesting; it was too easy. I had to force myself to look for something in him that stood in opposition to his horrible act. I imagined his childhood, and, when I did, I found myself creating a moment from his past in which he was vulnerable. I could no longer see the murderer in him without also seeing the innocent, helpless child that he was.
Find the child in the adult. Imagining a moment of childhood vulnerability can lead us to being more alert for moments in what I’ll call the dramatic present of our narratives where we understand how the actions of the characters are often influenced by what they’re carrying inside them from their childhoods. Feeling what our characters felt in their childhood moments of vulnerability makes us more sensitive to similar moments in their adult lives. We should always look for oppositional qualities in their personalities because those aspects of their character make them more interesting and more difficult to define. Charles Baxter, in Burning Down the House, his collection of essays about the craft of fiction, says we should make our characters “thicker.” By that, he means we should find the contrary parts of our characters that make them human beings rather than types. Our adult characters are, in part, products of their childhoods.
Rely on others. Another way of finding empathy for a character is to let another character in the narrative express it. Let that character say the things other people can’t say about themselves. “You’re not old,” one of my characters says to a grieving widower in my book, Turning Bones. “You’re just put upon right now.” When I heard the young woman say that, I immediately felt what it was like to be that widower. Her line of dialogue opened his character for me. Sometimes it takes a village.
Empathy connects us to our characters, even those who might not seem to deserve it. It’s not my job to judge them, only to make them interesting and to understand what contributes to their behaviors. Of course, even though I don’t replicate them, I find myself relying on the emotional content of moments of vulnerability from my own childhood. We are all flawed. We all have regrets. We all fall short of what we dream for ourselves when we’re still innocent. We were all children once upon a time.
Lee Martin teaches fiction and creative nonfiction in the MFA Program at Ohio State University and in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. His novel, The Bright Forever, was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and its sequel, The Evening Shades, will be published on March 25, 2025.