3.2 Val McDermid

Your own experience as a reader probably tells you that empathy is quite important in literature. After all, if you don’t care what the characters are feeling you probably won’t enjoy the book and if you find yourself experiencing the same emotions as the characters you are probably fully immersed in the story. Now you have explored a little of the psychology of empathy and also how you yourself might experience it, you will look at how our crime writers use empathy in their stories.

In this video Val McDermid outlines some of her thoughts on empathy with characters.

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VAL MCDERMID

I don’t explicitly set out to construct a sense of empathy with the villains, but I do want them to be rounded human beings. I don’t want them to just be baddies. I want them to have more to them than that. In the same way that when I’m writing protagonists, I don’t want them to be straightforwardly uncomplicatedly good people doing good things for all the right reasons.

Sometimes we do the right things for the wrong reasons. And sometimes we do the wrong things for the right reasons. And so I want to try and make all my characters have that kind of balance. And if I’ve done my job properly, then the readers will have a sense of empathy, not just with the villains, but with other characters in the book, even characters who have quite a fleeting role. I want them to care.

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