I feel you, broBot...
In which Jennifer riffs on empathy and voice
With the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025 being open for submissions until the end of June, I’ve been thinking a lot about stories and the nature of writing, and have come to the conclusion, not for the first time, that the art and craft of writing is a total blast!
When nothing in the real world is certain and so much is beyond our control, we can hit the keyboard and fashion a whole universe in a sentence or two, populate it with good/horrible/insane/traumatised people or cats or dogs or robots or whatever - being almost godlike in our writerly endeavours - then rub them out of existence with a few strokes of the Delete key. If we don’t delete them and instead put them out into the world, other people may read what we’ve written and be touched. And isn’t that what we really want, to move another soul so they come away altered?
It’s all about people… or cats or dogs or robots or AI-powered rocket ships, but to hold my interest, you need to make me care about them or hate them or evoke some hint of passion from my human heart.
Because what it’s really about is empathy.
Empathy is the secret sauce and the magic trick of writing, the sleight of hand a skilled writer uses to trick me into caring that Robot A is a troubled droid, her trouble being caused by that awful bastard Robot B. I want her to get away from him, and to definitely not go into the basement with him or climb those stairs. If the writer has done their job well, I’ll chew my nails when she does, but I’ll also understand, because she’s just that kind of robot.
Why am I talking about robots? Two reasons:
Robots are cool, and I always wanted one.
Ever since Robby the Robot first appeared in the movie Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred M. Wilcox, 1956), and later appeared in the Lost In Space TV series (CBS, 1965-1968), almost everyone of my generation has wanted their own benevolent guardian robot to keep them safe in this difficult and sometimes dangerous world.
What a feat it was, to create Robby and make me care so much about him that I wanted to take him home! An even greater feat was wrapping a whole franchise around two droids who were almost but not quite peripheral to the action. I’m talking about Star Wars, of course, with R2D2 and C3PO, who were right there in the final battles and somehow always managed to save the day.
Non-humans become interesting as characters when we give them human attributes and emotions. Think of the rabbits in Watership Down, Bishop the synthetic human in Aliens and Alien 3, David in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and Roy Batty, the main replicant in Blade Runner. Take it back a bit further, and include the seminal works of Issac Asimov, from the I, Robot series where he stated the Three Laws governing and limiting robots in their interactions with humans, the Elijah Baley series of sci-fi detective novels, which featured the human-like robot R Daneel Olivaw, first introduced in the novel The Caves Of Steel, to Demerzel in the Foundation TV series (though as far as I can recall, she doesn’t appear in the books).
Yes, we sure do love robots!
They can be human-like, symbolising the very best and the worst we can be, but the very last thing anyone wants to read are stories where human characters behave like stiff robots.
As readers, we want to identify with characters, engage with their struggle, and for the time we are reading the story, become the protagonist.
As writers, we achieve this by engaging with our own humanity, and being fully engaged with our characters when we write them.
My own stories tend to happen between what I like to think of as the tiny breaths of human existence, but when I begin writing a new piece - flash, short story or novel - I usually have only a vague notion of how it will develop or where it will end. I might start with an idea for the story and character arc, but often find them altering almost of their own accord. I like to think of this, of the development of a story, as an evolutionary process, one primarily driven by the protagonist rather than the writer. I get into the character’s skin and become them, in order to feel their pain. The character’s voice emerges from this process, and once I find it, they write the story for me.
In order to do any of this, I must engage with my own humanity.
And this is especially true when I am writing a non-human character, in which case I might be looking for contrasting attributes rather than mirroring ones. The same can be said if I’m writing a sociopathic character, where I might take my natural empathy and turn it on its head.
Dexter Morgan, anyone?
To stick to the point, in the creation of characters, it helps me to know and understand them if I know and understand myself. My characters therefore often end up possessing some of my qualities, though the whole of the character will be a mix, and won’t resemble me at all. In some cases, my characters are a reaction to me, perhaps representing a type of individual I might find it difficult to get along with, or one who possesses a way of being which I would like to emulate.
If I can achieve some of the above then I can show you my character’s pain, and bring you their joy. You’ll feel how sore their scraped knees are, you’ll hear their rosary beads rattle as they cry out to an uncaring universe for help, and you’ll feel endless tears scald their cheeks.
I’ll let them laugh and cry for you, and hopefully you’ll laugh and cry with them.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate... All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain..."
Roy Batty, the replicant, from Blade Runner
The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025, judged by Irish author Nuala O’Connor, is open for entries until June 30th, 2025.