How Do You CREATE and MAINTAIN Empathetic Characters?

There are many important aspects to writing a great screenplay; good dialogue, interesting settings, unique stories, and good characterisation. However, little is arguably more important than creating and maintaining empathetic characters.

Empathetic characters are the cornerstones of most great stories. Without an empathetic protagonist, in particular, the audience may struggle to connect to your story, narrative arcs, themes and even setting.

Even the seemingly most unlikeable of characters will have something in the way of empathy; a reason to be on their side. Essentially, an empathetic character should give the audience a chance to live vicariously through the story.

But before writing screenplays with character empathy in abundance, you need to understand what an empathetic character is and how best to create one in the first place. So in this article, we explore what you need to know about what empathetic characters are and the building blocks to bringing them to life in a screenplay.

What is Empathy and What are Empathetic Characters?

Empathy can often be confused with sympathy. While similar, sympathy is the action of feeling pity or sad on the behalf of someone else.

Merriam-Webster defines empathy as:

“The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.“

Merriam-Webster

In layman’s terms, empathy is the act of relating to another. This can be a real person or a fictional character. An empathetic character isn’t a character who relates to others. They are a character we, as the audience, can relate to or empathize with.

Character empathy is important in screenwriting in order to establish the investment in the arc of said character. Without it, it can be a struggle to stay engaged in the story for the time we need to be. Without convincing character empathy, characters become too objective and inscrutable. They’re hard to grasp and ultimately boring to watch.