Florida Man: Finding Your Empathy

By Bryn Greenwood  |  May 29, 2018  | 

Flickr Creative Commons: Marsha Wheatley

Florida Man Arrested for DUI after Ordering Burrito in Bank Drive-Thru

Florida Woman Shoots Husband and Her Mother after Uncovering Their Affair

Florida Man and Florida Woman have become icons of the 24-hour news cycle, the protagonists of a thousand “truth is stranger than fiction” stories. Florida Man and Woman get played for laughs or sensationalist click bait, even when the outcomes of their stories are serious injury, death, or emotional devastation. Because of that, they offer a useful exercise for connecting with your characters, even the ones you hate, even the ones you want your readers to hate.

While the news cycle and social media have turned Florida Man into a monolith of terrible life choices, the important thing to remember is that each Florida Man in each news story is a real person. The fateful decision that gets him on the news is a product of his personal life, his childhood, his hopes, dreams, and desires. This is true for Florida Man and it’s true for the characters you write.

Once, while discussing a writing project in which a couple of white supremacists have a walk-on role, my agent said, “Please don’t make them sympathetic.” She knows me well enough to know that my inclination as a writer is to connect with every character in some way. Even the characters I despise, I want to understand how they came to be who they are. It may not end up in the final draft of a book, but it’s always part of my writing process. The trick is to control how empathy and sympathy interact. Empathizing with your characters isn’t the same as writing them to be sympathetic characters.

In casual conversation, I frequently hear empathy and sympathy used almost interchangeably, but in terms of fiction, sympathy is for readers. Let them feel sorry for your characters. The writer’s job is empathy — submersing yourself in the worldview and emotions of your characters. You have to see the world through Florida Man’s eyes, and you have to share in the emotions that Florida Man feels.

Take for example that second headline about Florida Woman. That’s a real person who has arrived home from work to discover her husband and her mother are having an affair. Now, I’m not the sort of person who thinks a gun is a good solution to most problems, but if I were going to write this story, I would look back at the worst betrayals I’ve experienced in my life. None of them rise to this level, so I have to turn it up all the way, and put myself sincerely into this scenario to see how Florida Woman made the decision to shoot her husband and her mother.

Try it out. Take your worst betrayal and distill it to its essential emotions. Imagine coming home to find your spouse having sex with one of your parents. Don’t laugh at the possibility. Don’t sit back with your popcorn as the horror unfolds. Put yourself in that situation. That’s how empathy works. Figure out how you would feel, and then consider what you would do. Consider what your character would do, based on their background and life experiences.

The two types of characters who most frequently get glossed over are villains and victims of tragedy. You see it most often with villains whose motivations are never quite clear. They’ve made an elaborate plan to destroy the planet, but why? What motivates them? What problem does destroying the world solve for the villain? To figure it out, you don’t need to make your villain sympathetic, but you’ve got to empathize with him. There are bad people who do bad things, and you don’t have to humanize them or redeem them. Not everyone can be redeemed, but if you go through the process of empathizing with them, you’ll have multi-dimensional villains whose diabolical plans are motivated by something deeply personal.

A similar problem occurs with characters who have tragedy visited on them. It’s easy to sympathize with characters to whom bad things happen. We’re taught to be concerned about people who are hurt, but tragedy written without empathy looks a lot like titillation for voyeurs. Pornographic tears and heartbreak. Pity without substance. Rape as character development. If you haven’t experienced the kind of pain your character is going through, you need to imagine it happening to you in deeply personal detail. You must empathize to move past a simplistic view of pain and suffering.

What’s worth remembering about this is that psychopaths are capable of empathizing with other people, usually as a means to manipulation. Many serial killers use the skill of empathy to calculate and control how victims will respond to them. Writers can deploy a similarly analytical approach to empathy, but we can also soften ourselves to humanity. In a time when social media puts the worst of human nature on display, it’s tempting to want to turn off that softness, but it serves us not just as writers but as humans.

Learning what motivates murderers or white supremacists or muggers doesn’t require us to feel sorry for them. We don’t need to like them or wish them success, but understanding how they got to this point in their lives is useful. We can use our knowledge to protect others, to thwart villains, or even to rehabilitate them.

What’s the hardest character you’ve ever written in terms of your ability to empathize? Have you ever used your empathy process as a writer to deal with people in real life?

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9 Comments

  1. Benjamin Brinks on May 29, 2018 at 10:07 am

    In my WIP, I am trying to turn some received ideas inside out, though characters.

    For instance, my young hero is in love with a girl who can see the future. Mostly, we would regard that as a golden gift. A ticket to an easy fortune. But for the girl it’s a curse because seeing the future isn’t the same as changing it. Terrible things have happened to her, and will again.

    Her antagonist is semi-immortal. We tend to think of immortality as a divine attribute given to Greek gods and such. It’s a good thing. But is it? Immortality is a curse, too. It does not automatically confer wisdom or peace. Our first twenty years shape us–or twist us–and centuries don’t change that.

    My hero’s role is, in part, to empathize. Figuring out how he understands those two in ways that others do not has been a challenge. The part of your post that leapt out at me was this:

    “You need to imagine it happening to you in deeply personal detail.”

    Great advice. When we recount our lives to others we don’t generalize, we tell stories. Certain incidents stand out, and it is the details that we retain which bring the episode alive for listeners.

    Details make it real, and when it’s real we empathize. Gonna use that. Thanks.



  2. Erin Bartels on May 29, 2018 at 10:10 am

    Great post, Bryn. As to your questions, the manuscript I’m currently developing has been difficult to write precisely because it is dealing with something (and someone) that happened to me in real life long ago. It’s been a long road in the direction of forgiveness and moving past it, with various developments along the way as I reached new levels of maturity and experience.

    One of the most impactful points on that journey was when two very empathetic people to whom I told the story challenged me to consider a question I hadn’t yet, a question one step beyond “Why did this happen to me?” They went directly from saying “I’m sorry that happened to you” to saying “I wonder what happened to him.”

    Contemplating that question (and coming up with a plausible answer based in other things I knew happened in our little town around that time) is what propelled me to write, and it is what gave me (and my protagonist) the ability to stop thinking about the event as only a wrong against me/her and start thinking about it in terms of a string of causes and effects in which both were victims and ultimately both deserved sympathy.

    Because we could empathize, we could sympathize, forgive, make peace, move on, and even see how something very bad was part of what formed us into the people we are today, how it made us stronger and even fueled a chosen career path.

    It came down to realizing that what we are today is the sum of everything, the good and the bad, that has happened to us. And without some of that pain, we would have turned out to be different people than who we are now.



  3. Deb Merino on May 29, 2018 at 11:20 am

    Great post. I think the best villains are the ones that are not entirely bad. Real people that at one time were innocent children or your friendly, helpful neighbor. What’s intriguing is what triggers someone to turn bad and act out. We all have to potential for good and evil. Thinking back to our kindergarten class—can we imagine who would turn out to be a criminal or a killer? Maybe we would be surprised at the answer. That’s the scary factor.



  4. Fredric Meek on May 29, 2018 at 11:32 am

    A timely post. I was just getting my “Unboxed” fix before starting work on my antagonist who needs to be developed more deeply. You’ve given me the magic word to work out how to approach it: Empathy. Donald Maass talks about character’s worldviews and it seems that’s a good place to start. I know who and what he is and if I draw on my own dark side, maybe I can find what makes him see the world the way he does. Thanks Bryn.



  5. Lynn Waddell on May 29, 2018 at 11:34 am

    Your post speaks to me on many levels. I wrote a non-fiction book, about people with unconventional lifestyles in FLA called “Fringe Florida.” Empathy played a huge role in my trying to understand people who do odd things and show their humanity. So, your headline caught my attention. As a fiction writer, I haven’t applied empathy enough to all my characters. My novel in revision, “Desert Fish” is set in Las Vegas in the 1990s and involves casino graft and murder. I worry that my villains might be cliche, particularly a casino boss. I don’t get inside his head, so the reader only views him on actions. But I realize now that I have, too. Your post encourages me to go deeper. Thanks.



  6. Deborah Gray on May 29, 2018 at 2:13 pm

    Thought-provoking and beautifully stated. I’m sure there are many writers who will file this for reference. As a primarily non-fiction author, this doesn’t come up much for me! But in my trunked novel I tried to make a murder suspect – a radical abortion clinic protester – a more layered character. Not sympathetic, but a background that wasn’t one-dimensional and motivation for the murder that was far different from what you’d expect.



  7. Beth Havey on May 29, 2018 at 3:28 pm

    Enlightening post on many levels. Thanks, Bryn. I will be looking carefully at one of my antagonists and making sure that the experiences that formed her are not some carbon-copy of an idea, but pull from the roots of her human experience. Your zeroing in on empathy and sympathy so important.



  8. Vijaya on May 29, 2018 at 3:41 pm

    Good post, Bryn. I wonder if many writers aren’t natural empaths. We imagine, we slip ourselves into characters’ skins, and we can understand why someone good would do something terrible.

    I used to have a difficult time with antagonists but they’ve become some of my favorite story people to think about. And in real life, it’s helped me to forgive people who’ve wronged me. I find myself feeling more sorry for them than anything else and heaven help me, even prayed that I might see them in heaven. Thanks Bryn.



  9. Bjørn Larssen on May 30, 2018 at 4:57 am

    Beautiful post!

    This is something I am doing now. First WIP (nearing completion) has a sociopathic, violent character whose goal is to “settle scores” in a game nobody else was aware they were even playing. Second – 2nd draft – has a white supremacist incel. And yes. He’s going to be multidimensional to the best of my ability.

    I learned it from George R. R. Martin, actually. Write characters that are never 100% good or 100% bad. It’s so easy to write a horrible person, or a do-gooder-no-matter-what. It’s a challenge to avoid the door marked “it’s because of childhood abuse”. Especially if I personally dislike the character!

    PS. Now I feel guilty about every single time I chuckled at a “Florida man” headline, and last time was two days ago! Busted.