The better you know the characters, the more you’ll see things from their point of view. You need to trust that you’ve got it in you to listen to people, watch them, and notice what they wear and how they move, to capture a sense of how they speak. You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.

Overall, we found that speed was good. Books, movies, and TV shows with faster plot progression were liked more than their slower-moving counterparts.

Just as atypical lyrics make songs more interesting to listen to, a faster plot progression makes a story more stimulating. Rather than just plodding along, moving faster between more differentiated topics and ideas is more exciting, which leads audiences to react more favorably.

In addition, we found that within stories, there were times when plots should move faster and times when they should move more slowly. At the beginning of a book or movie, the canvas is blank. An audience doesn’t know who the characters are, what the setting is, or how everything relates. So the beginning of a story sets the stage, building a base or jumping-off point for the rest of the narrative.

Starting slowly is key. It takes time for the audience members to digest the characters, their relationships, and everything else, so a plot that moves too quickly at the outset may confuse them.

In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the “other” as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir —where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster—the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.

The third empathy skill is caring. Con artists are very good at reading people’s emotions, but we don’t call them empathetic, because they don’t have genuine concern for the

people they are reading.

Throughout this chapter I’ve been trying to emphasize how physical emotions are, that becoming more empathetic is not some intellectual enterprise; it is training your body to respond in open and interactive ways. To recover from painful traumas, people need to live through experiences that contradict what happened to them earlier in their lives. Someone who has been abused has to experience intimacy that is safe. Someone who has been abandoned has to experience others who stayed. This is the kind of knowledge and learning that is held at the cellular level. The rational brain is incapable of talking the emotional body out of its own reality, so the body has to experience a different reality

firsthand.