Discussion toward a rich writing exploration I’ll post next time.

Anya Achtenberg

Nov 22, 2025

Empathy Engines and the Imagination. Part One. Anya Achtenberg

But first, a few snarky comments from a frustrated creative writing teacher.

I teach creative writing. I mentor writers. I consult with writers on their manuscripts. Many people have found me by word of mouth. Thank goodness. I don’t offer quick tips or boot camps (all very well); nor “prompts”—but people who study with me write—and rather than prompts, they will be sparked by rich suggestions for expansive writing explorations.

I don’t offer 10 steps to…; 3 rules for…; the 5 parts of… every story? (I rather critique conventions, and discuss the shady context of their origins and blindness. I consider the complexity of a diverse world at an urgent moment where many writers are aching to find story forms that reflect their truths, and the truths of the planet. We work to find, to create, these organic forms in a world where that celebrated “climax and release of tension” of the conventional 5-part story does not operate in the stories I am most interested in, nor in the realities I care most about.

That said, I can also work with writers wedded to that form, and help them, for instance, deepen characterization.

What moves stories of discovery, not manipulation?

I share approaches for how to move closer to both the imagined characters and actual beings in our writing. It is from within the empathy machines that move us, that great dialogue is born, poetry is born, story that is not manipulation but discovery—is born.

Remember, “Garbage in, garbage out”?

Well, I say, AI in, AI out.

I say, writing conventions in, conventional writing out.

I say, rules which developed from old biases, meant to ignore and hide the realities of people considered “less than”, can keep our writing in the clutch of such patterns, kill its dynamism, and serve the origins that excluded the many of us. [I actually have a self-study course on this on Udemy…I’ll post a link another time.]

So, I scanned a mob of How to’s for creative writing on Facebook and Instagram, and it creeped me out.I am a sucker for substance. I’d like to assume the courses are more substantial than their promo-hooks. I know there are many brilliant writer-teachers of creative writing. But, I didn’t, this day, in the scads of descriptions in social media-advertised writing courses, find substance or even originality. How can a single approach be used by many for each to produce their best and most authentic work?

I don’t teach prefab formula; I can’t easily package what I do. Developing as a writer works in a spiral, as we revisit our understanding of various aspects of our craft, develop our resistance to limiting rules and superficial techniques, and grow as well our own consciouness. Ultimately, an easily sold checklist of do’s and don’ts—don’t cut it.

Here I offer an unpackaged bit of discussion I hope is useful—and in tomorrow’s post—a suggestion for an exploration to generate rich and surprising writing. It may also leave you with an idea that will impact future work, especially on writing people/characters, actual or created.

Today, I’ll introduce the basis of what developed into one of my favorite writing explorations. Tomorrow, the suggestion for the writing exploration itself.

Empathy Engines, who said?

A few years ago, I watched the series Transatlantic, which deals in part with the many refugees who gathered in Marseilles trying to escape the Nazi occupation of France. The series focused especially on artists and intellectuals including Marc Chagall and Walter Benjamin, and many other refugees. (see also Transit, Christian Petzold’s 2018 film based on Anna Seghers’s novel (1944), which he adapted as set in the present day—”a brilliant existential film” which “works like a dream.” The Guardian)

Back to the short film, The Making of Transatlantic. One of the directors says (around 27:00:00):

“Fiction is an empathy engine. It allows us to enter another human being’s experience.”

(Can one say the same for creative nonfiction/memoir? How does that empathy engine work in writing creative nonfiction? Think, speculation. Think, re-imagining. There’s much to that discussion!)

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Imagination and the Empathy Engine in Story

Part of a writer’s work is that reverent imagining of others, as well as that reverent exploration of self. A writer (as any human) may experience a kind of melting of the boundaries between self and others. And, if lucky and a hard worker, may experience a melting of the boundaries within the self, bringing up more of the self to be accessible to both the conscious mind and the trance mind, the writing mind.

Who can say what you write is a correct imagining or an incorrect imagining? (There is of course an endless supply of those ready to evaluate, judge, the validity of our very imaginings.)

But what we imagine, what we vision forward, never insists it is the utter and miniscule truth, the only truth that counts. A narrator in a book of fiction might say so, and wow, we’d have fun watching that self-righteous, arrogant narrator disintegrate into doubt. But in fiction, whether this character seems to live in us in this particular way; or, this character imagined has deep connections to those walking with real feet in the world, it is still a created being in a fictional world.

Imagining other people, other beings

What are your goals of imagining other people, other beings? Might it bring you into a terrain you didn’t know you could reach? Into a character you might be very different from, in important ways? Or, you might be more similar that you at first understood?

Remember The Making of Transatlantic, in which one of the directors says,

“Fiction is an empathy engine. It allows us to enter another human being’s experience.”

Empathy Engines!

Empathy locates knowledge of others.

Empathy yields enormous fuel for the imagination,

in a way that connects humanities.

The poem I will bring you tomorrow holds a brilliant and useful approach that can fuel our empathy engines.

I’ll reprint a little section from one of my Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World Workshop Series. That workshop is called Place and Exile/ Borders and Crossings. This discussion sits in that workshop specifically because of my understanding that being dislodged from place (and time), being without place, existing between identities and places in various ways, while a painful experience and a rough way of going through life, also assists our own fluidity when it comes to borders. Such people cross, often. They may be diasporic. Have multiple and disappeared origins. Be “mixed”. Know trauma. Be gender fluid. Live perhaps in ways at the crossing.

Many people with this kind of experience might yearn for a more solid identity and place and name, but it might also be true that displacement and being out of category might nourish our empathy engines, and contribute to our crossing, since we have yet to find place and category, or comfort or safety in the place or category we somewhat inhabit. This may add to our understanding of borders as flexible, permeable, or in ways unreal. [Of course, when the borders are materially, punitively, strategically, brutally, real…and under the control of those whose empathy machines are broken, perhaps beyond repair or never existing at all—we must deal with the daily realities of such borders and the brutality machines that forbid crossing.]

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Now, this poem I’ll share next time holds a brilliant approach that can inform and fuel your work to imagine others more fully, more surprisingly, and still more respectfully. It will help activate your empathy engine for your writing, with deep respect for your characters.

End part 1.

Part 2 next time:

The promised poem, and, then, a very generative writing exploration to deepen characterization in any story form.

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