I’m editing a biography of an accomplished pediatric heart surgeon. The author had interview access to many of the parents of the children with damaged hearts, and he was also allowed to be in the operating room when sometimes superhuman attempts were made to repair that damage. What struck me (and terrified me too) was how with a factual narrative accounting of the bleak medical outlook for these tiny patients and the sophisticated efforts to save them, the book and its stories relentlessly pulled me into its emotional center.
I don’t have any children, so it wasn’t a reflex empathetic response. I think it was the unvarnished way the writing described the terrible conditions of these kids, born with severe defects in their hearts, and of the waves of terror and tedium that followed for the parents in attending to their care. Or helpless in the face of it. And then, in the operating room, a day of reckoning.
Vulnerability is the story’s core: here were children as young as three weeks old getting open-heart surgery, children as young as four years old getting heart transplants. The vulnerability of these tiny kids, the vulnerability of their parents—it was breathtaking. That emotional magnet in the writing pulled and pulled, no matter that some of the material was also technical and dry.
Now for a more personal story: the closest thing I have to a child is my cat Malibu, who has delivered humor, charm and consternation to my house for a few years now. A couple of weeks ago, she came in with a swollen cheek. She had a small scratch above her eye, so I presumed she had a little infection from a fight.
Malibu was semi-feral—we got her after seeing her wandering our rural neighborhood for close to a year. She’s skittish, and it’s unimaginable to consider trying to get her in a pet carrier and bring her to a vet. So she’s had a mobile vet for all the time we’ve had her. He came by, examined her, gave her a shot of antibiotics and supplied us some liquid antibiotics to give her over the next five days.
The next day, her face was inflated, the cheek bulging like a golf ball was underneath, her eye nearly shut, and her manner transformed, from lively cat to a halting, aggrieved creature. Now, I love this cat, so I was alarmed. And we couldn’t reach the vet, having left him a few anxious voice mails. By the next morning, her face had ballooned all the more, but with a ghastly twist [trigger warning: vile accounting to follow]: her wound had exploded and was oozing pus, and did so repeatedly over the next day.
We finally reached the vet, who told my girlfriend and I that the burst abscess was a good thing (!), and that were he to have come over, he would have lanced her face to release the filth. He suggested just continuing with the antibiotics routine, and apply hot compresses to her face periodically to encourage the cheek fluids on their merry way. We did, and she has fully recovered, albeit slowly, and is back to heatedly rebuking us for the rigidity of her dining schedule.
But—and parents, forgive my equation here—I was struck even more, because of the personal immediacy, of Malibu’s vulnerability, and how emotionally engulfing that sensation of vulnerability is. And thus how useful the coaxing of that sensation in a reader is for a writer.
The fear doubled: she’s going to die!
The condition healed: thank god, but what if she had died?
But with care, writers can create that sinking, engulfing feeling in the stomach of readers, the fear, the vulnerability. My lead character in the novel I’m editing has some deep cracks in his character—self-deception, a drinking problem, arrogance layered over poor self-esteem—but I’m hoping there is a building up of goodwill towards him in the reading, a sensing of his vulnerability, developed over the one-step-forward/two-steps back rocking of his world, so that readers feel his damaged heart, and beat with it.
to that dark center where procreation flared.
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Of course, this is a poem, not a novel, so Rilke compresses the sense of identification and developed history in our seeing of the headless Apollo. For me, despite the power, the dazzle, and dark procreative centers, there’s a feeling of vulnerability here. And then, the simple declarative “You must change your life” is a magnitude 10 quake. Boom! Through Rilke’s genius, the reader transforms into the vulnerable one.
We all have so many small (and sometimes large) losses and longings in life. The surgeon in the biography has had so many remarkable successes, but she’s also seen death, and the devastation it brings. The devastation is a consequence of being vulnerable. I have to do a final proof on the biography, and I’m going to look for how the wording, rhythms and structure first caught me. There are ways that even sometimes cynical writers like me can put a beating child’s heart in a manuscript. And to do that well, so that your readers feel its tremors and its triumphs, could be the cat’s meow.
Tom Bentley is still trying to figure out what flavor of writer he is, but so far he’s a short story writer, novelist, essayist, travel writer, journalist, and business copywriter. He edits all that stuff too. His new book, Think Like a Writer: How to Write the Stories You See is available as an ebook on Amazon. His singing has been known to frighten the horses.
I have a nephew who was born with a hole in his heart. 23 surgeries. He has been critical so many times. His parents are exhausted, but he started junior high school this fall and is doing fine.
Remember the bomb that blew up on 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan a week ago? My wife, son and I changed buses at that intersection seven hours before it went off. The second bomb, which didn’t explode, was placed in front of my former office building on 27th Street. The stuff of the news can happen very close by.
We are all vulnerable but what makes us feel that in fiction? When those we love are in peril, the peril itself becomes immediate and personal. The sense of helplessness we feel is because the peril is random, out of our control, vicious, and could happen to anyone.
Thus, not just any plot circumstance will provoke helplessness and make us shaky. We first must care. The strike must be cold, cruel, random and unpreventable. No problem, right? It happens in life. It can happen on the page.
Don, 23 heart surgeries? The weight of that—my god. And as you say, the random, cold strike on someone we love—which happens every day, to many people in many places—gets its devastating power because of love and its possible losses. Creating that caring has to be much more than a calculated plot mechanism, though I suspect the writer has to juggle the structure as much as the emotion to deliver the biggest impact.
I have felt some of the terror and threat of loss in characters I’ve written, but they are my characters, and closest to me. I have a long ways to go before I can evoke the richest of that in my readers, but the pursuit is priceless, the feeling of rendering one of those things that makes us human, our vulnerability, and pulling the reader into that.
And man, stay out of the way of those bombs.
All I write about are vulnerable characters and I struggle with pulling the reader’s heartstrings without sounding maudlin. The key, as Don points out, is to make the reader care about the character, make the reader feel that this terrible random event could happen to anyone. Because it can.
I’m sure we have to draw on some of those situations and people that have cracked our own hearts over time, but getting it to the page—that’s the rub.
Malibu is such a gorgeous cat! I worried for him and for you. Well done, Tom.
One of my favorite medical writers is Atul Gawande. And what’s clear to me is that I immediately care about his patients. I bond very quickly. I imagine it is quite the same as you work with your pediatric heart surgeon. Oddly enough, I found myself numb, just going through the motions when my friend delivered her first baby at 26 wks. It was touch and go for the first three months and I realized we were both afraid to fall in love with the baby because he might not survive. Yet, love still bloomed. You just can’t help it despite your fears. When my nephew was whisked away for heart surgery the night he was born, same thing. A certain numbness. He’s a healthy 16-yr-old now.
In my own writing, I’m discovering that I withhold emotions. But the upshot of this is that my readers will cry for my characters. Or laugh.
Vijaya, I told Malibu what you said and she just sniffed and walked away without a backward glance. Cats. I have read some of Gawande’s stuff too—his subject on the surface is medicine in broad strokes, but he gets way below the surface (and makes you feel), while still in complete control of the science. Great writer.
I like that sense that you are describing of being afraid to fall in love with a being that might be whisked away—that’s such a confused, conflicting (and arrhythmic, to get medical) emotional state that’s so unsettled and anxious. A horrible way to feel, but one that’s good to work with as a writer.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say you withhold emotions in your writing (and yet get reader reaction). How does that work?
Of course, Malibu took offense to being referred to as “him.” Completely understand.
About withholding emotions: the characters hold back. It increases tension, and there’s all this pent-up emotion that can make the reader cry. For example, I wrote a story about the kindertransport and I would not let my 12-yr-old character cry when she gets on the train. She has to be strong for the little ones. My critique partners bawled.
This essay made me think of two of my secondary characters from my first trilogy, which might seem odd to the very few readers who know them. They’re both the opposite of vulnerable at the onset – self-assured to conceit, willful, skilled and strong. They both begin their journeys as foils to my primary protagonists, but I found myself pouring so much into their downfalls and subsequent humbling, followed by their transformation into the vulnerable, fallible humans they’d been deep inside all along.
I think of them often. I know I wasn’t a skilled enough writer to make their stories worthy, let alone to make the entire trilogy’s story worthy. But, for some reason, I still long to make it worthy, and these two are a big part of that. Maybe it’s because that journey to humility mirrors my writing journey so closely.
Here’s to finding human vulnerability, and the courage to carry on in the knowledge and acceptance of it. Thanks for a thought-provoking post, Tom.
Vaughn, your statement on the long and sometimes divergent path of your characters brought up a point that I missed in my piece: how to get to a reader’s identification or involvement or vulnerable absorption in a character doesn’t have to begin with some obvious debility or inadequacy or emotional injury in the character. The fall from grace or prodigal son structure could work very well too.
The high-handed braggart might be all bluster (and hiding a hungry heart), or might need to fall from his horse many times to feel anything, and make us as readers feel anything too. Of course, sometimes a high-handed braggart is just that, but perhaps not that interesting except as a foil.
Great post, Tom. I now totally understand that title Save the Cat. Because you are now a hero in my eyes.
As for vulnerability and a sense of authenticity in my characters. My go-to Manuel for this is not a writing book, but an acting one. Acting is Believing. It us a book with many editions but the core message stays the same, in the delving deep to explore character.
Over time I have developed my own methods and techniques from this base. And they work. For me.
Heh. My phone changed manual to Manuel.
Bernadette, I figured Manuel was your acting coach. I’m not familiar with the book, but I take from the title some sense that the most successful actors pull from deep to make viewers get emotionally entangled with their fates. And to translate that to writing, writers must believe in the vulnerability of their characters if readers are to feel that as well.
Please tell Malibu that I am a hero. She thinks I don’t even have the sense to keep her bowl topped off.
Wonderful post, and great quotes from both Rilke and Neil Gaiman.
I describe vulnerability as one of the five cornerstones of character (the others being desire, defense, secrets, and contradictions).
There are two responses to vulnerability: either we’re drawn in because we care, or we’re repelled because we’re frightened, or disgusted, or outraged, or in some other way feel the need to distance ourselves from the feeling the other’s vulnerability evokes. Either way, the reaction is strong.
This circles back to Don’t comment that we need to care, or the peril will not move us. As much as I agree, I also believe that, once you make a character vulnerable, the readers’ natural inclination to care is likely to be enhanced. This is why when you give an “unlikable” character someone else to care about — “a kid or a dog,” as I like to say — our affinity for the character deepens. We care about those who care about others, precisely for the reason Neil Gaiman identifies: to love is to be taken hostage.
Physical/existential: The peril is to the character’s physical well-being or even threatens her life.
Emotional: the character risks a loss of status or a key connection to someone she cares deeply about.
Moral: The character risks being judged for what she does, rightly or wrongly.
Situational: The character is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time (which tends to lead to one of the other kinds of vulnerability as well).
The key factor underlying all of these is uncertainty: how will the character overcome or survive this sudden peril?
In this way vulnerability not only triggers empathy, it enhances suspense.
Glad to hear Malibu is on the mend. We seem to feel the vulnerability of kids and pets especially keenly, because (we think) they have no comprehension of why they’re suffering–which for some reason seems to enhance the sense of victimization, the lack of justice.
David, you bring up two significant things I didn’t consider (and for my next post, I will simply leave a number of blank paragraphs for you to fill in, because your fill-ins are fulfilling). The first is that the vulnerability could be judged by the reader as an off-putting weakness of some kind that makes the reader uncomfortable—but that causes a reaction and stirring. Good point. I tried to think of a literary example, but couldn’t, but I know exactly what you mean.
Thanks for adding a lot to the discussion David.
I can’t think of a literary example either. My principle examples come from the real world, where people respond to another’s misfortune with some variation or another of: He deserved it. Saves you all that messy business of trying to understand, or feel compassion.
thanks for your post. Because I have a son who faced serious heart problems as an infant and young child, I’d like to read this book. Can you please email me the name and author?