How to Create Heart In Your Story

The secret is to create empathy with your reader. How do you do that?

Take a moment to consider what you do in real life to get understanding and sympathy from your friends. You tell them a story, and you tend to exaggerate what feels unfair or sad or unlucky. People empathise, because they can identify with your pain and suffering, as these emotions are universal.

Pixar’s writers are the experts when it comes to emotional storytelling. It is worth having a look at what they do. Empathy is Pixar’s signature skill. Pixar have a formula to help their writers create emotional, fully-rounded characters that the audience will love. It runs as follows:

EC = EM (R+P2 + H+A+ ES + (MS))

Don’t panic; it’s easier than it looks. By the end, you’ll be able to sleepwalk your way through this.

STEP ONE: Find the Emotional Core of your Story.

STEP TWO: Create Empathy between your Characters and your Audience.

STEP THREE: Use Recognition, Pity, Human, Admiration, Emotional

Stakes + Meaning.

THE MORE SPECIFIC YOUR STORY, THE MORE UNIVERSAL ITS APPEAL

Crack how to create empathy and your readers will love your characters. Empathy is more powerful, more subtle than merely making your characters likeable. You can have a social misfit like Eleanor in Gail Honeyman’s award-wining debut novel Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine but you love and empathise with this character because we understand Eleanor. Is your head spinning? Mine was. It is a lot to take in, but it’s really useful. Pixar suggest six things for you to think about that will help to make your story the best it can be.

RECOGNITION

Your readers recognise their own emotions in your character. Love, fear, hate, envy, joy, embarrassment and hope are universal emotions. The trick is to show universal emotions in a specific context. The more specific your story, the more universal its appeal. It feels counter intuitive, doesn’t it? It took me ages to get my head round it. But you have the advantage: everything in your writing journal is about being specific, about looking up and recognising things by name.

PITY

People empathise with an underdog. The more unfair and cruel a situation, the more you root for the character. Pixar consider pity so important the P2 in their formula reminds writers to load on painful, unfair obstacles to make us care. That’s why Harry Potter lived under the stairs, with a cruel uncle and aunt – we were on his side from the outset.

HUMAN

Your reader must be able to see your characters as one of us. Even if you write sci-fi or historical figures, or create monsters and baddies. Example: Pixar’s WALL-E. He is shown as the lonely trash-collector, a robot yearning for love and connection, watching old romantic movies. We can all relate to that. Writers show superhero characters as human. In The Incredibles, Elastigirl (Mrs Incredible) sulks as she vacuums. She resents cleaning the house. We recognise that feeling of injustice that we all have when you do more than your fair share of the chores.

ADMIRATION

Humans like to admire people. Superhero stories max out on this idea. The skill in writing comes when you can create empathy with smaller admirable acts of bravery or kindness. What is one core talent or quality that you can show your protagonist has, for readers to admire?

EMOTIONAL STAKES

What is at stake in your story? The trick is to set your character’s stakes really high. When their world doesn’t change in some way and it doesn’t matter if they fail or not, then you don’t have a strong enough story.

MEANING: THE WHY OF YOUR STORY

Why does your character care about their particular goal? Your story goal doesn’t have to be life and death, it could be about a character coming to terms with loss; but it must matter to them. They must care and you must know why they want it or the reader won’t care if they get there.

Lucy van Smit is an award-winning author, a screenwriter, and artist who regrets selling off most of her paintings to pay the rent. She got her BA Hons in Fine Art, blagged a job in TV, travelled worldwide for NBC News, flew on Air Force One with President Reagan, got surrounded by tanks at Manila airport during a coup, before she chilled and made documentaries for Canadian TV on writers like John Le Carre and Ian McEwan.

Lucy is dyslexic with a Distinction in MA Creative Writing. The Hurting won the inaugural Bath Children’s Novel Award and was published by Chicken House.