Comments on: Learning to Write XXV

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 13:37:24 +0000

Hi John – not sure if your smiley face is a simple Easter greeting or signifies more?
I have to confess to my own ignorance, before I’m found out. I’ve never read any Foucault, nor for that matter, many books of philosophy.

jb says: It’s only a philosopher’s smile.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 10:57:08 +0000

John – ‘Is there really such a huge gap between the professions in the first classification and the second?’ – No. I see what you mean. The chap himself was a lay-minister, in an evangelical church, but as colourful a character as I have ever met.
Also, the short Foucault quote pulls a lot of thinking together.

jb says: Hi Paul. Strange, isn’t it; Foucault doesn’t always manage to do that.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 08:38:13 +0000

John – I wasn’t sure if the thread was closed, but I felt there seemed to be questions lingering in your responses.
Perhaps the difficulty we experience in empathising with our antipathy, comes from a writer’s need to understand and explain. With the more ordinary characters we are content to describe them as they are, and have them act “in character,” accepting that they exhibit certain character traits, perhaps to a more exaggerated level than the norm.
With the darker characters we perhaps feel more compelled to understand and explain how they became so.
Yet we see daily how some children are treated in public – shouted at, sworn at, ignored, hit – It’s only a small, if frightening, leap to imagine how they might be treated in the privacy of their homes.
The strange thing is that some people break away from their roots, whilst others take it as a template for the future.
I once worked with a chap who came from a family of ten or twelve children. Half his family were in caring professions (nuns, ministers, nurses, doctors) whilst the other half were criminal, or bordering on such (drug-dealers, prostitutes, thieves). Even he didn’t understand why.
I read something about most decisions we take being made in our sub-conscious. That our conscious mind only really had the power to reject or go along with that decision. Thus the conscious mind, as ultimate arbiter, reinforces or erodes impulses from the sub-conscious, and thereby conditions the next reaction to similar stimuli/situations. Each choice we make therefore determines who we become. Whether we change, or remain the same, or head off in a new direction, depends on those choices.
We humanise by seeing similarities between us, we de-humanise by dwelling on the differences.
When we have no choice, or little control over our own lives, then psychological trauma will often result.
Thank you for providing the stimuli for thinking through some of my own writing problems in terms of characterisation.

jb says: There are three emotions involved, sympathy, empathy and antipathy. Sympathy has always seemed, to me, to be a completely useless emotion. I prefer something more active, like love. But sympathy has this tendency to pull everything into itself, to merge separate identities into a common mass. Antipathy, on the other hand exerts an opposite pull, keeping things apart, maintaining a separate identity. The two working together maintain a status quo which maintains identity and a recognition of shared similarities. Perhaps it is not in stasis, but a moveable feast, sometimes maintaining strict separation and at other times allowing a kind of merging.
By the constant counterbalancing of sympathy and antipathy, identities “can resemble others and be drawn to them, though without being swallowed up or loosing singularity” (Foucault, The Order of Things).
To empathize means to recognize diversity as the “the action of understanding, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts and experience of another or either the past or present, without having the feelings, thoughts and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner” (Webster’s Dictionary).
Something else struck me about the professions in the family you refer to. Is there really such a huge gap between the professions in the first classification and the second?

By: john baker

john baker — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 07:35:31 +0000

I’m interested, in this instance, in the development of character and of the use of empathy on the page.
And from a writer’s point of view it is important to be able to go there whether it feels comfortable or not. In fact, often, it is more important to go there when it feels downright uncomfortable.
Language and art lead to dark places as well as light ones.
I believe that most of us find it relatively easy to empathise with someone we like or someone we recognise as like ourselves, but the real trick is to be able to empathise with the character who is our antipathy.
As a writer you have to be able to write about and empathise with characters who are horrifying and perhaps repugnant to you.

By: Jerry Prager

Jerry Prager — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 19:44:26 +0000

And sitting in the far off field
where beginnings circulate like breezes
you catch a drift and dive back in.

By: Shawn

Shawn — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:48:45 +0000

Hi Paul and John. Sorry I didn’t get to this sooner–though I did have a moment to post on John’s blog, it was a busy day yesterday.

Paul: I don’t think your question/comment was pretentious, I actually agree with what I think you’re trying to say. I think what you wrote is a description of precisely what empathy is. We really can never truly know another human being the way we know ourselves, which makes the “walk a mile in their shoes” such an apt phrase; we can’t be another person, but if we place ourselves in their situation (or at least try), we can not only better understand another person, but recognize their humanity by recognizing ourselves in them.

Obviously, how well we can pull this off can depend a lot on who we are trying to empathize with. Albert Schweitzer would be a lot easier to empathize with than, say, Mussolini, but even with the most repulsive of individuals we, at the very least, learn that even the most unspeakable behavior is well within the capacities of every one of us.

I hope I don’t sound like a moral relativist by that last line. I think (or maybe I just strongly like to believe) there are basic natural moral principles that all humans share, in particular the capacity for cooperation, compromise, friendship, and love–hardly the ten commandments, but our morality comes more from these vague impulses than from the text of any religion. What perverts these natural impulses are what a given society or culture values over these natural impulses, and most societies have always encouraged either the suppression of these natural impulses in favor of other equally natural impulses (territoriality, competition, aggression, greed). Or, if these good impulses are not suppressed, they are sublimated to serve some purpose other than the harmony and well being of a community, which I think they would naturally tend to promote.

Anyway, there’s my theory which may or may not be relevant but, in any case, I’ve gone quite far afield from the original topic.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 09:45:54 +0000

I’ve just read my own posting and it sounds pretentious.
The whole thing was probably meant as a question, rather than as an answer. I tend to be too prescriptive in establishing characters – telling the reader what to think – rather than letting the character emerge from dialogue, action, and perception of setting.
I use too much convenient dialogue and excessive reminiscences.
I need to be a better editor, but I would welcome any tips (as per original blog) and suggestions from your readers.

jb says: I didn’t read it as pretentious, Paul. Merely a point of view. But I didn’t answer it as it was addressed to Shawn, and I was interested in what he will say about it. (No pressure, Shawn.)
As for tips; you’ll get plenty of those here, though from your remarks about letting the character emerge from dialogue, etc. you’re already a long way down the road to creating convincing character.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 08:50:42 +0000

Shawn – I think you’re right about empathy, but wonder if it extends further than that when writing. My feeling, which I find difficult to express, is that when we develop characters in our writing, we are in a sense giving form and expression to different aspects of ourselves.
We are all, part inheritance, and part upbringing, but thereafter the choices we make determine who we become, define us as individuals. All the emotions, love and hate, kindness and greed, are latent inside us. We choose to reinforce one aspect and erode another, developing a conscious and unconscious definition of self, trying to be who we want to be, and sometimes who others expect us to be.
The fact that the basic gamut of emotions still exists, however, gives us the power to empathise and to write about diverse characters, sometimes very different to ourselves. In a sense when we write about others we are writing about different aspects of ourselves, magnified and exaggerated, but nevertheless there. We are “walking a mile” in their shoes, because we tap into parts of ourselves that are also part of them. We examine how our own character might change if the world around was suddenly different.
In the end, perhaps that’s what empathy is, locating common understanding within ourselves.
I always remember the actor (though I forget his name) who played “Yozzer (Give us a job) Hughes” in “Boys from the Blackstuff” . He played the role so well that he changed, both mentally and physically, until he almost became “Yozzer” in real life.
John- You’ll have to accept my reassurance that I am sane. This is just something I’ve been thinking about in the context of character development.

jb says: It was Bernard Hill; the actor.