♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦
Topic #172
Have you ever made yourself cry (over what you
did to a character) while writing a book?
Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.
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Let me answer this question first by saying a few things that will help you to see me in a bigger, clearer picture…I am someone with great empathy and I am someone who is intuitive. I am also someone who has and uses discernment. The latter two have a great deal to do with the first. Some like to call people like me empaths, inferring we feel the emotions of others. Considering I come from a scientific background, I don’t necessarily lean on alternative ideas. I do believe, however, that the brain puts together a picture of the environment in which it exists, those it interacts with, and situations that arise from both. In other words, what some regard as psychic phenomena, is more likely the brain having put together clues it observed without the ego getting in the way—which is how some get it confused. It might feel like the information is coming from nowhere, but it has roots, it just bypassed the usual channels. That’s why, too, the assessments are often right. But, it’s not mind reading. It’s just an example of how powerful our minds are as processing computers. If you follow me.
The brain absorbs everything in a particular situation. It catalogs it. It assesses it. It remembers it. The thing is, we don’t remember seeing all the details. And, assessment can take days or weeks—sometimes years.
So what does this have to do with the question?
As you know, being empathic or empathetic, has a lot to do with emotions, and being able to comprehend of them in others. For example, when you see someone cry, you cry. That’s not sympathy. Empathy is understanding the suffering that another human being is experiencing in that moment–recognizing, acknowledging it.
Empathetic people are able to do this conceptually as well. This is why, for a lot of authors, characters are real. If you imagine the process we authors go through to create characters (characterization), then you should be able to infer (intuit) that those characters become virtually real.
Empathetic people are tortured by the idea of suffering in others, causing it or experiencing it with them. They’re in touch with their emotions, and feel them deeply. When characters in a book follow a trajectory that ends terribly for them, that investment creates emotion. The empathy we function with in real life situations is as much present. Thus, we feel the pain, the joy, the pleasure, the discomfort…all of it. Perhaps, that is why we write?
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash
In each of my works, when something has happened to one of my characters, I have felt for them, and, yes, I have cried. Do you ever watch the news and they tell the viewers of someone who had their whole life ahead of them, but died tragically instead? It’s like that. If you have empathy, you’ll register the tragedy of it. You’ll feel the terror.
The interesting thing is that writing comes from what we know or interpolate from our knowledge. In a way we’re empathizing with ourselves, because characters written by a person are, if not based on other real life people, based on the author themselves. When they die, that part of us dies. Thus, grief occurs.
Let’s hop on over and see what the other authors have to say about this topic…
Link: https://fresh.inlinkz.com/p/173117c3c00f40e4b0b99c4271fd3711
