Why do some books creep into your thoughts months or years after you read them? Most thrillers bring us great fun for the hours it takes to read them. Great ones often are finished way too soon. But only a handful stick with us.
I find myself drawn to authors who create not only strong and decisive protagonists, but even more to those who tell me who they are. What makes the antagonists tick; why do they do really bad things. My friend Bob Dugoni is a master, especially in books like his Charles Jenkins trilogy. Another friend, Terrence McCauley’s westerns take a reader into a real town full of real people, not caricatures. I remember characters from Steve Berry stories I read long ago. Incidents, including the characters, from the master John Le Carré try to slip into my books.
Thinking of what makes these stories memorable, I arrive at one thought: these writers understand EMPATHY as do the characters they create. Plato offered, “The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.”
One of the most interesting characters in the sequel to The Eel And The Angel, (due out in October) is a young man that I, as the author, have empathy for even as he facilitates attacks on America that kill hundreds. When the book comes out, please share with me your thoughts on Farid.
My recommendation: go back to some of those books that really stick with you and read them again. We live in a world where we have substituted Sympathy for EMPATHY. Sympathy, “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.” Empathy, “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another,” leads us to share in and personally try to help others in need, while sympathy is all about making our own sorrow go away. Awakening the empathy in each of us is a duty of an author, at least in some books.