A Quick Exercise On Understanding Human Motivations
Following on from yesterday’s post about how we’re writing for humans, one of the things I recommend you do is to start building a dictionary of “character motivations.”
This is true whether you’re reading the blog for the fiction writing stuff, the non-fiction/copywriting stuff, or the weird psychology bits.
Because really, as human beings, we’re bound by a few things; psychological, biological and probably spiritual as well, depending on how you’d want to define that. We’re driven to seek sex, competition, warfare, power, resources and so forth.
This is hardwired into all humans at a collective level and expresses itself uniquely at an individual level.
There are various models for dealing with this; the various schools of psychology, science, most religions have one and pretty much everyone has their own patchwork model of how humans are motivated to do what they do.
I suggest you spend some time building your own and testing it out, and one way to do it is to get some categories for motivations and just write lists of things.
It’s hard to describe because I don’t want to be prescriptive about it, but something like:
Humans are designed to survive and replicate.
It’s a statement first promoted in turn of the millennium science books like The Selfish Gene.
Start with it and work down; what do people do because they want to survive? And what do people do because they want to breed?
It starts with a very broad brush. At the same time, work upwards; why would a person wear make-up, for instance?
You’ll get the obvious ones; to attract a mate. To look better than their peers. Because they’re insecure about a facial feature.
Go past where the obvious lies, or go further on with a single train of thought. This is a fun exercise to engage your creativity so that when you come to use it in the real world (or your business/writing) you’re better at it than you need to be.
A girl wears makeup because she’s insecure about a facial feature. Which feature? Why is she insecure? Where does that come from?
You don’t have to go very deep, even with the most universal of human motivations, to find unique pieces of motivation and psychology that nobody else really ever gets deep enough to find.
This in turn gives you a huge edge in every endeavour, and makes you a better, more empathetic person at the same time.