Hello

I’ve had feedback from a couple of literary agents suggesting that readers do not have enough empathy with my main protagonist and that she needs more emotional development or feels ‘blank’. I was a bit surprised by this as it is a first person narrative in which I’ve included plenty about her background (drip-fed it, but maybe too slowly), have often stated how she is feeling and reacts to certain situations and have gone so far as to include a some anecdotes from her past and even moments when she has arguments within her own head etc, which I thought should have given quite a deep insight into her personality. She is supposed to be newcomer/outsider to the setting, and I wonder if viewing her out of place has taken away some context.

Does anybody know of any tips I could use to make readers relate more to characters? I don’t really have a writing background, so I wondered if there were any ‘textbook’ strategies which writers use.

Thanks

Livi

This is something I come across all the time in manuscripts I do reports on - even really good ones - and always with MCs or important viewpoint characters. It's as if they live so vividly in the writer's imagination (hardly surprising, given how long they've been there) that the writer doesn't realise they're not giving the reader enough to live for in our heads (often happens with towns/houses modelled on the writer's own, too, for the same reason - it's so familiar to them, but not to us). A few thoughts:

It's particularly common with a first-person character-narrator, because you can't describe her from the outside, or show what other people think of her. Of course you need to know her background, backstory, and so on, but the 'not-enough' I'm talking about isn't really that material. You the writer need insight into her personality, but the reader needs to experience that personality, as we'd experience that of a friend: by what she does/thinks/says. The key to revealing character, as Aristotle knew, is to think of it as character in action. And the action consists not of adjectives about how she's feeling, but what those feelings mean she says/thinks/does, and how other people react to her. (A mis-match between how she thinks she comes across to other people, or what she thinks she's doing, (kind and helpful, say) and how they seem to read and react to her (clearly - to us - finding her bossy and overbearing) can be particularly revealing.)

Contrasts can help, and you can do it quite cold-bloodedly: an inhibited intellectual looks more inhibited and more intellectual against a warm, instinctive, in-your-face earth mother. (Have you noticed how all Disney characters except hero and heroine are permutations of fat/thin and tall/short? And pairs of them are usually maximally opposite - Asterix and Obelix style). So it might help to identify your character's most appealing characteristics (quirky humour, sympathy for underdogs, sharp-eyed perceptiveness, passion for cooking) and make some others be the opposite.

The other thing I'm wondering about is voice, because that's the key to feeling that we're really living inside someone's head. Is every single word she says - dialogue and narrative - fully characterised? Are they all things she would say/notice/think, and in the words she'd express them? Or does it sometimes slip into something blander and more neutral, which means we no longer feel as if we're in her head, seeing everything through her eyes (though as readers making our own judgements about what she sees)?

Emma

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Tsk!

the writer doesn't realise they're not giving the reader enough to make the characters live for us in our heads

So it might help to identify your character's most appealing characteristics (quirky humour, sympathy for underdogs, sharp-eyed perceptiveness, passion for cooking) and make some other characters be the opposite.

As Emma says, this is a very common problem in mss - even in well respected, published ones. Is I've said on various posts today, I'm reading Sebastian Barry's Secret Scriptures which was a close runner up for this year's Man Booker prize. It has two narrators, Rosanne and the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist is such a boring old fart that a thrid of the way through I almost gave up on the whole book.

Aside from boring MCs, the other type I dislike are the whingers.

Have you read Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle? That is a good example of a narrator - the teenaged, Cassandra - who is easy to like and empathise with. The vain and grumpy sister, Rose, is seen through the eyes of Cassandra and her dislikable character is filtered through Cassandra's somewhat 'rose-tinted spectacles'. I don't think the novel would have worked if it had been written from Rose's pov, since, aside from her beauty, she is pretty unlikable.


- NaomiM

I Capture the Castle's a great example. In fact one of the reasons I love putting diaries and letters into novels is because the voice always seems to become so strong. And I love it in others, too: it's as if the writer found it particularly easy to characterise the narrative really strongly, once they were imagining the character writing things down. And as readers, we're much more conscious that what we're being told might not be the whole story - as with Cassandra's view of Rose - and therefore go looking for what's not being said.

Not that I'm suggestion you should recast it as a diary, Livi, only that it does 1st person narratives (and 3rd person narratives from limited PoVs) no harm to think a bit that way...

Emma

Thanks,

I did mean to ask if anyone could recommend good examples of 1st person narratives where you have real empathy with the character - so any more suggestions would be great.

In the meantime, I'll have a look at the one you've both suggested.

Cheers

Livi

Jane Eyre's the classic example, of course.

Fingersmith - two first-person narrators.

Remains of the Day: empathy in a slightly despairing way, I suppose, and an absolutely brilliant example of John Mullan's Inadequate Narrator.

Bridget Jones - more definitely diary-like than Cassandra.

Lots and lots of women's fiction is that kind of thing - anyone else.

Emma

Great question! I've realised almost all my favourite novels are narrated in the first person, although I couldn't say what the technique is for getting that first person voice right! Not very helpful! A few of the ones with (I think) empathetic female narrators are;
Who Will Run The Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore (a great first person writer)
White Oleander - Janet Fitch
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood
Oh - and Notes On A Scandal by Zoe Heller, I think has a fantastic first person narration - I empathised so much it was painful, even though she's really quite a horrible character! But as a reader you get to know why she's become that way.
My favourite first person voice is The Education of Little Tree by Forest Carter - there was huge controversy because everyone found out the author wasn't Native American, which I think goes to show what great writing it was - everybody assumed the narrator was the author.
But that's probably not much help to you Livi! How about posting up a segment from your novel for more exacting, useful feedback about your narrator in particular?!!
Don't lose heart anyway - it may well need tweaking rather than a huge overhaul!
All the best, JC x

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Ooh! Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca! Beautifully dealt with insecurity! (There's a narrator who is trying to cope with being an outsider in a new situation!)
I'm sure it's definitely a question of getting the 'voice' right. I remember reading Sylvia Plath's letter (or something) when she'd found the voice for The Bell Jar - she was so excited! That seems to suggest it took her a bit of work, which I hope is encouraging! Emma's suggestion of writing a letter or diary in your narrator's voice is a really good one - even if you don't use the device in your final book it might just get you into character. x

Goodness, I forgot Rebecca - doesn't get more first-person than that, because you're so aware that she doesn't know the whole story.

(Talking of which, which we weren't, I'm always amazed when Rebecca's spoken of a romantic novel: it's one of the bleakest, most un-romantic novels I know...)

Emma

Absolutely Emma! It's so dark, even I love it!!! I think D du M is underrated because of that whole 'romantic' attachment to her...
Oh god, it's five past one. How did that happen...? The WW time warp strikes again!
J xx

Yes, she's very dark and weird - Margaret Forster's biog of her is good on that side. I remember reading My Cousin Rachel as a teenager, having enjoyed Rebecca, and being disconcerted at every turn by you thought (well, I thought) it was going to be conventional costume drama and it turned out to be something much more gothic and neurotic.

Emma

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And actually the narrator of My Cousin Rachel is another innocent in the house of the damned - like the nameless MC of Rebecca - who doesn't understand what he's narrating.

Thanks for your suggestions everybody.

Reading through your favourites, I realise that I've actually already read most of these. I guess that shows the success of a good first person narrative - the reader has the empathy but isn't always conscious of exactly why.

I went back to my bookshelf and took out all the first persons (Blind Assassin, Wide Sargasso, Lovely Bones, TKA Mockingbird, Bonjour Tristesse etc. etc.) Funnily enough, Rebecca was the one I chose to re-read and I'm half way through again and forgot how good it was. Analysing it in this way, I see how DuMaurier really hammers home the character contrasts which Emma mentioned - there's something on almost every page.

Not sure how much of this kind of thing I can work in to my own manuscript but at least now I've rediscovered some of my old inspirations.

Cheers

Livi