“Empathy, a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading” (Keen 2007: 4). So Suzanne Keen writes at the opening of her book Empathy and the Novel. This encourages here what surely must be an anticipated question: “But what about creative writing?” That is, while reading a work of creative writing might evoke empathy, can the actions and aspects of writing that work similarly entail empathy?