📖 On Writing a Novel of Empathy

A novel like this would be no easy task. Where would one begin? How could characters or a plot develop? Perhaps the reader’s own character is the one meant to evolve—to be enriched through reflection and experience.

The possibilities are vast enough to induce writer’s block in even the most seasoned author—or team of authors.

Maybe a structure that moves from present, to past, to future would offer a meaningful direction. Chapters could focus on specific aspects of life: identity, conflict, love, justice, mortality. Yet keeping the attention of readers would be a challenge—not to mention the difficulty of maintaining a coherent design across such philosophical terrain.

The bibliography would need to be extensive. It would draw from:

• Religious texts
• Philosophers and cynics
• Idealists and warlords
• Pacifists and agitators
• Idiots and geniuses
• The apathetic and the impassioned
• Every stereotype we’ve contrived—and their paradoxes

But amid this mosaic of voices, I nearly forget the one thing that could bring such a novel to life, to cohesion, to resonance:

Empathy—the intellectual identification with, or vicarious experiencing of, the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.