Writing With Compassion For All
No Good, No Bad, Just Flawed Humans
Welcome to The Writing Sanctuary, which brings together insights and inspiration adapted from my Year of Mindful Writing and Well Writer courses along with my training in therapeutic journalling and positive psychology, my many years of experience as a fiction writer, creative writing teacher and publisher of other people’s books and stories, and my journey with mindfulness, Taoism, Buddhism, Gnosticism and metaphysics.
Each month there is a mix of ideas and writing prompts that can help you develop your craft, connect more deeply to who you are as a writer and a human, and find ways of using your writing as a force of good in the world.
If you’re a paid member, you’re all set for these monthly posts, which will arrive in your inbox on the first Friday of the month. You’ll be able to share your responses to the writing prompts in the comments and I can’t wait to read what comes up for you.
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Writing with compassion for all
Last month we looked at how we become more compassionate writers by starting with showing ourselves more loving kindness.
Now we are looking at how we bring that level of compassion to how we write about other people. Whether we’re writing fiction, memoir or essays, the way we portray others reveals a lot about how we feel about ourselves as well as them, so we need to look inside and draw on our love for our own self and our shared humanity even when characters, or people, behave in hurtful ways.
So how do we find this compassion and empathy for the people in the stories we write? How do we ensure that we bring nuance and understanding to everyone no matter what role they play and the difficult behaviours they demonstrate?
This is something I have learned to do by really looking inside myself and trying to feel how it would be to walk in another person’s shoes. I come from a very troubled family that was filled with violence and abuse and my childhood and young adulthood was traumatic. My stepfather and stepbrother sexually abused me, and my mother and stepfather physically, verbally and emotionally abused me too. For a very long time I had no compassion for them at all and it wasn't until I started to have more compassion for myself that I could start to find it for them. Which is why I started this series of posts with self-compassion exercises.
To feel compassion for them I had to develop cognitive empathy. And as writers this is a vital tool for us to have in abundance. Cognitive empathy is when we can understand another person's situation, behaviours, feelings and emotions. It involves being able to imagine what they may be feeling by putting ourselves in their position.
In working to grow this inside of me so I could write compassionately about everyone, I devised a way of understanding people that I call ‘The Three Cs of Character’ which can be used for people who appear in the fictional stories we tell, for the people we know when we write memoir, and for anyone who appears in the life writing we do.
Initially I developed this to help me with creating fictional characters, but it is a great tool for understanding everyone we write about and share this human experience with.
The first C is Complexity
Humans are complex beings. The ways we behave can be hard to understand. Often we make things more complex than they need to be.
The second C is Contradictoriness
We say one thing and do another. We are loving, spiteful, generous, miserly, self-confident, doubtful, the list goes on. And often all of these contradictions appear within one day!
The third C is Consistency
We find a way of being that we think is us and we stick to it, steadfastly, even though somewhere deep down inside we know that it might not be the best way for us to be.
A really important thing to remember in writing with compassion is that nobody is ever all good, or all bad. In the introduction to Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, this is described in the following way:
“The teaching of the Tao Te Ching is moral in the deepest sense. Unencumbered by any concept of sin, the Master doesn't see evil as a force to resist, but simply as an opaqueness, a state of self-absorption which is in disharmony with the universal process, so that, as with a dirty window, the light can't shine through.”
So whether we're writing characters who come to us or about people we know, we can see that some people’s windows have a few smudges and smears of dirt that need cleaning up, while others have ones that are filthy with just small patches of clear glass where the light gets in.
By making sure that we apply this knowledge compassionately to all the people we write about, we can ensure that our readers connect to our writing as the characters we write will be real, complex people.
It’s the contradictory character traits in human personalities that create complexity.
These personality traits I’ve listed here are just a tiny example of the many different characteristics that humans embody. In true complex human style, even though these traits are perceived as negative or positive for the purposes of this exercise, they could all lead to the opposite effect in our stories, and our lives.
For example, being funny while seen as positive could lead to negative outcomes if the humour is used at the wrong time or in the wrong way. And while being secretive is perceived as a negative trait, it could lead to positive outcomes if a secret is kept that could only bring harm if it was revealed.
Writing Exercise
Working with the main characters in the story, memoir or life writing piece you are currently working on, make notes on the contradictory personality traits they have and how that leads them to behave.
Take what you learn and use it in how you write on from now, and in how you edit the scenes you already have.
Do this exercise for all the people you write about in the future to ensure that you have the full complexity of human behaviour in them and a compassionate understanding of who they are so you can write with empathy for them no matter what they may do in your story, or may have done in your life.
Choose a character from your work in progress that is challenging, that behaves in hurtful ways and is hard to like, and write from their point of view. Ask them these questions then write the replies in their first person voice and see what is revealed:
What happened to you that makes you treat other people the way you do?
Do you ever think what the consequences of your actions might be?
How do you think your behaviours make others feel?
How do you respond when you realise you’ve hurt someone?
They may resist telling you at first, but keep probing. Ask any additional questions that may arise prompted by what they tell you. Write until it comes to a natural end. If you are doing this exercise for a person you know, you will have to use your imagination and what you know about them and their lives to try to understand them. Leave the answers to sit for a while then go back and read through what came out and ask these questions of it: