Empathy: The Engine That Powers Stories and Society

When I was gathering short story ideas for my first collection of culinary noir, ‘Add Cyanide to Taste’, I wanted to include a story about so-called clean eating. The topic had been all over social media and I found the debate intriguing and amusing. That’s why I created Hanneke, an Instagram influencer obsessed with clean eating.

At first, it took some restraint not to poke fun at Hanneke’s obsession with her need to prove herself to an army of strangers who followed her on Instagram. The deeper I ventured into the story, the more I understood WHY she was obsessing and what she was actually after. Once I understood that, my perspective shifted completely. Instead of observing Hanneke making one terrible mistake after another, I felt with her and ended up changing the initial ending because of it.

In short, writing fiction is an exercise in empathy. Unsurprisingly, so is reading fiction.

In ‘Wired for Story’, Lisa Cron dives deeper into the neuroscience behind storytelling and she shows how stories strengthen our sense of empathy. To sum it up real quick, mirror neurons allow us to experience a story as if it were happening to us. This means that readers go through the same experience and change as the protagonist does, without ever leaving their reading chair. Not only does the reader enjoy this armchair transformation, it’s one of the main reasons they pick up a work of fiction.

Why? Because it allows them to imagine what they’d do in a similar situation and feel better prepared and equipped for the future. It’s how we’ve survived as a species.

To create an empathic experience for the reader, the writer needs to elicit raw emotion and answer the same question page after page: why should the reader care? No empathy and the reader will start losing interest in your story.

The role of empathy goes far beyond storytelling, though. Margaret Mead, one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists, supposedly said that the first sign of civilisation in an ancient culture was a healed femur. Not a tool, a clay pot, a figurine or a hunting weapon, but the longest bone in the human body.

How so? The fact that a femur healed meant someone stayed behind with the injured. Someone sacrificed their own safety by separating from a larger group and cared for the injured person. That’s empathy rewriting history, challenging the ‘survival of the fittest’.

Bottom line, empathy is the cornerstone of our civilisation. There’s a good reason lack of empathy signals several personality disorders such as narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. Keep that in mind as you evaluate statements by the likes of Elon Musk about empathy being the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation.

Without empathy, there is no civilisation.

P.S. This month, I explore three tools of resilience that help writers tackle rejections and impostor syndrome. Best thing about them? They’re free and easy to use.