If I had to name the single most important trait a writer can develop, it wouldn’t be vocabulary.
It wouldn’t be structure, or discipline, or even originality.
It would be empathy.
Not performative empathy—not sounding sensitive or saying the right thing.
I mean the real kind.
The hard kind.
The kind that asks you to sit with someone else’s truth, and try to understand it without judgment—even when it makes you uncomfortable.
Because that’s the work.
That’s the writing.
As a writer, you have to live a thousand lives that aren’t your own.
You have to understand your protagonist, yes—but also their antagonist.
You have to understand the sidekick, the bystander, the victim.
Even the one who causes harm. Maybe especially them.
Why?
Because real people always believe they’re justified.
They believe they had no choice.
Or that they did—but they made it for the right reasons.
Empathy doesn’t mean agreeing.
It means seeing clearly, from the inside out.
It means asking:
What does this person believe? What do they want? What do they fear?
Not just your heroes.
Everyone.
Even the ones you hate.
That doesn’t make the villain right.
It makes them real.
And that’s the difference between cardboard cut-outs and living, breathing fiction.
You don’t have to approve of every character.
But if you can understand them—if you can feel your way into their choices—you’ll write with more depth, more tension, more truth.
Because without empathy, all you have are events.
With it, you have people.
People are what we read for.
I’ve shared this perspective in discussions with other writers and gotten some pushback. I’m here for that. While I don’t fully agree with the pushback, I can see the edges of it.
And maybe the edges are enough.
Some antagonists are beyond understanding.
They’re Pure Evil—something to whom the very concept of goodness is alien.
Forces of chaos made manifest.
Or someone so emotionally shattered that all they can do is rage and destroy.
Characters like that are difficult to empathise with.
Difficult to understand.
They don’t feel like people, not in the traditional sense.
They feel like forces—like agents of story-level antagonism more than fully realised individuals.
Even then, you still need to understand them enough to make them work.
Even a force of chaos has a goal.
Even a monster follows rules of some kind, even if only its own.
You don’t have to justify them.
You don’t have to soften them.
But you do have to know something of why they do what they do—so their actions stay true to their nature, their worldview, their own broken logic.
Because that’s how even the worst of them become real on the page.