If you want readers to sympathize with your character, one way to do it is for the character to show compassion for someone else. It might be another human. It might be an animal. Whatever. Compassion in a character is a great way to make readers sympathize with him/her. Here are some examples.
Writing tip #1: Use compassion to create sympathy for a character.
I’ve heard it called the “save the cat” moment: the action the character takes to help someone else. It goes a long way toward creating sympathy for characters intended to be sympathetic. It helps give a different dimension to an otherwise unsympathetic character.
In both Beyond the Moon and Where There is Smoke, there’s a moment when the female lead shows concern for someone else. Up until these points, I hadn’t particularly cared for either Louisa or Krista. These scenes changed that.
In Beyond the Moon:
Louisa, a despairing psychiatric patient, is exploring an abandoned part of the hospital when she hears a man calling for help. Though she cannot see him and knows that she will be in trouble with the staff for being in a forbidden area, she is compelled to help him. Taylor writes,
“But Louisa couldn’t walk away from someone who was hurt. (…) ‘Just a minute,’ she called. ‘I’m coming!'” (chapter 8).
She takes decisive action. And as Louisa goes to rescue the hurt man, we see her compassionate heart.
In Where There is Smoke:
Here it’s more subtle. Krista’s stepbrother has wrecked a car being used to tow a horse trailer. The police and local veterinarian, Oliver, arrive and rescue the horse, who is slightly injured. Krista comes and behaves like an entitled snob. The horse is hers, she informs them. Her attitude appears arrogant, condescending, and prickly toward everyone involved. It’s difficult to believe that she’s going to be the female romantic lead in the novel.
Then she turns her attention to her horse. As she examines the cut over the horse’s eye, her tone alters to “unexpected concern”:
“Is she badly injured? What about her eye? Isn’t that a lot of blood?” (chapter 1)
Then later, when Oliver mentions her insulting attitude toward his professional abilities, Krista blushes, apologizes, and expresses worry about her horse and whether it’s in pain. When we read Krista’s point of view, we see the real woman; she does care about her horse and knows that she’s behaved badly but has no idea how to relate to others except in a superficial way. Those small moments of concern for her horse that help us see the real Krista beneath her prickly surface.
Now, obviously, the extent of their compassion depends on the person, their role in the novel, and how much sympathy you want the reader to have for this character. I assume that you don’t want us to sympathize with, say, a serial killer!
Writing tip #2: Writing about a different time period? Show us the differences and the similarities.
(From A Conspiracy of Wolves by Candace Robb)
Alisoun, a healer, muses about sometimes seeing her reflection in water and associating certain features with her parents. Her mother’s cheekbones. Her father’s eyes. Robb writes,
“But she could no longer put those features together into clear memories of their faces” (chapter 6).
Alisoun goes on to wonder about her patient, who has recently lost her husband, and ponders how long it might take her to forget her husband’s appearance.
How many photos do I have of my loved ones? They’re everywhere: my phone, the bookcase, the dresser, the computer and photo albums and half-finished scrapbooks and unsorted piles in boxes, even clipped to our refrigerator by magnets. I couldn’t forget my kids’ appearances if I tried.
Yet Alisoun doesn’t remember her parents’ faces.
This is an excellent way of showing the differences between the time periods. Then: there were no photographs and few portraits of common people. Now: we are inundated with images. Here, Robb reminds us that it hasn’t always been easy to see our loved ones’ reflections or remember their appearances after their deaths.
But there’s also a connection between the time periods here, too: grief at a loved ones’ loss. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a parent or spouse or pet. We lose someone, we grieve. We want to hang on to their memory. In this short scene, Robb uses the physical difference in time periods to emotionally connect us with Alisoun and her patient. We sympathize with the emotion, even when our circumstances are different.