Empathy

- What are the different ways that authors use to get empathy from readers
- Achieving empathy is really difficult because people (author, reader) have so many
different experiences
- Character identification is the strongest tool to generate empathy
- Dependent on socio-political & historical factors
- Current abilities to use science & psychology to tracking empathy
- Plot structure doesn’t affect levels of empathy
- Is in-group identification necessary
- Are authors more empathetic naturally or does writing make them more empathetic?
- Empathy (I feel what you feel/I feel your pain) vs Sympathy (I feel supportive emotion about
your feelings/I feel pity for your pain)

Authority
- Authority is stability & gave the world permanence (necessary because of human’s morality)
- Needs to be legitimate and unquestioned
- When there is a need to understand something, authority provides a stable answer
- Conservatism and liberalism oscillate continuously but the removal of either results in
tyranny
- There needs to be a balance between the two for authority to work
- Conservatives believe that authority protects freedom
- Authority is “a central weight that keeps things in equilibrium”, a guide

What makes a story believable?

- Target audience helps make a store believable to its audience
- Need for narrative authority, if there isn’t a clear point of view/authorship in a story it can be
confusing (someone has to be telling the story)
- Equilibrium between authorship and lack thereof