No doubt you’ve heard the old adage: “You don’t really know a person until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.” The same can be said for your fictional characters.
Does your heroine wear high heels, running shoes, or toe shoes? Does your hero wear wing tips, deck shoes, or high-tops? And what about villains? Somehow I doubt Cruella DeVille, the high-heeled fashionista in Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, and Annie Wilkes, the psychopathic fan played by Kathy Bates in Stephen King’s Misery, wear the same type of shoes.
But really, this admonition has little to do with shoes. In fact, your character may prefer to—or simply have to—go barefoot and shun shoes altogether. What it really means is that you need to get inside someone’s head and heart and feel all the emotions filtered through that individual’s previous life experiences and genetic tendencies as well as the physical sensations flooding into that person’s body and mind in reaction to zir immediate circumstances.
Yes, you should know what type of shoes your heroine would wear in any given situation in your story, but more than that you need to know how she feels while wearing those shoes in that given situation. If she’s wearing high heels, is she standing tall and feeling confident? Does she feel feminine and sexy? Or is she limping slightly, wincing in pain as her toes are squished together and wondering who the hell invented such torture devices as she decides to slip out of them at the first opportunity? Or perhaps she is feeling like a fraud as she totters and stumbles, unaccustomed to such fashionable accessories, and blushes with shame as the more popular and better-dressed girls giggle behind their well-manicured hands at the school prom.
What type of clothing a person or character wears does indeed tell us something about that personality, but we learn even more by discerning how that individual feels in that clothing.
What does it feel like to be so tired at the end of each workday that you don’t have the energy to lift a spoon to feed yourself, much less prepare a meal? To be told you have a terminal disease and had best get your affairs in order, sooner rather than later? To be a single parent with three children still in diapers? To have lost your true love to a war or fatal accident when you were only 23?
These are situations most of us have not experienced, and yet, as fiction writers, we often write about hopelessness and hardship as though we have. How do successful writers pull this off? They are blessed with an abundance of empathy, that characteristic that allows us to have a sense of how others feel even though we are not ourselves in the same situation as they.
Of course, you can never know what it’s really like until it happens to you, but you can interview people who have endured such difficult times and read stories about it and gather information from such individuals through social media and, if you are yourself empathetic, which I think most fiction writers must be, thereby get at least a sense of your character’s feelings of helplessness and loss in such dire situations.
I am very fortunate in that my husband is still alive, but I remember one time when I was driving down a dirt road and, for no particular reason, suddenly found myself inside the head of one of my characters. He was thinking about his deceased wife, and my heart grew so heavy with grief that I had to pull off the road and stop driving. This is what is meant by walking in your character’s shoes.
Many experiences you can manage to duplicate yourself, at least to some extent, to “see what it feels like.” For those that you can’t—or shouldn’t, use your empathy. Learn to be more observant of people. See not only their clothing and hairstyle, skin color and eye color, but their posture, their facial expressions, the fear or pain or delight in their eyes. And learn to listen, really listen, to others. Be still within yourself and find yourself within them.
And then you will never run out of stories to tell because everyone has a story.