
The Author and the Empath
We live storied lives. Our days stretch out in sequence; our minds record the movie. We author our existence as we live it. We have to; it’s part of being human. This is why we all have stories to tell.
We tell stories for many reasons. But one reason matters more than all the others: stories help us understand the way the world works and the way we work with it.
Writing true stories about the facts of our lives helps us understand ourselves and the world we live in. But writing fiction helps us understand all of this (and more!) much better. If that seems strange to you, you’re not alone. It seemed very strange to me when Dr. Canedor, Chairman of the English Department at Central Washington University, and my first college English teacher said, “Fiction is where writers go to tell the truth.” Actually, I don’t think he said it first. He was just the first person who said it to me.
“Fiction is where writers go to tell the truth.” Seems unintuitive. Even in Dr. Canedo’s class, it took a while before it sunk in. But he was a great teacher and an even greater human being. He was the person who taught me a lot of things about books. And the fact that fiction is where writers go to tell the truth was one of the most important until I started reading fiction seriously in college, writing about fiction, and eventually starting to write my own fiction in my fifties.
This book is full of fact and fiction. Many of the examples come from great writers. Some come from me. To create these examples, I’ve written more fiction in a few months than I have in my entire life. In the process, I’ve discovered something that never before crossed my mind: writing fiction requires empathy.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the thoughts and feelings of other people. In fiction, these other people are our characters —and our readers. To know them, we step inside their being. We live their lives as though they were our own. We feel what they feel; we think what they think. If we couldn’t do this, we couldn’t create fictional people that real people couldn’t understand and relate to.
Empathy is essential—in art and in life. Without it, we wouldn’t think about anyone other than ourselves. We’d be selfish, self-centered, and worst of all, alone. To be part of the world, we have to understand how other people — our characters and our readers in this case — think and feel. At the very least, we have to make an effort. That’s what writing fiction is: an expression of our effort to understand the truth of the world and the truth of how other people understand it—how they relate to our vision, what they think about our thoughts, what they feel when they encounter the feelings of our characters.
What do you think and feel when you empathize with the character below:
Call me Ishmael.
Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
— From the opening of Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Do you ever feel like Ishmael? Like you have to get out of wherever you are and off to someplace different? I don’t mean leaving your home or your family. For most of us, it’s simpler than that.
When I was a kid, it was getting out of my house and onto a basketball court or a baseball diamond. Like Ishmael, I also needed to explore the watery part of the world. Fortunately, a watery world existed just a few blocks from my house, did not months at sea on a large ship, and involved no contact with whales. I think the largest fish I ever saw as a 14-inch trout.
At a small city lake, my dad taught me how to fish when I was six or seven. By the time I was ten, I was fishing on my own. I spent hours casting from the shore and waiting, my eyes fixed on the tip of a fishing rod, looking for the slightest movement that would tell me I had something on the line: an erratic staccato wiggle that differs only slightly from more slower, slighter more regular up-and-down created by small waves and light winds. Day after day, from late spring through summer and into the early fall, I stood at the water’s edge, in all kinds of weather, waiting. Fishing is mostly waiting. Waiting and hoping.
Empathy is what makes it possible for us to understand an old man, restless and dour, and a young boy, patient and hopeful. It’s also what makes it possible for me to understand you, and the patience and hope you feel as you begin working on your novel. If I’m lucky, you may come to understand a bit me, too, the purpose of my patience, the nature of my hope.

