In this week’s episode, Crys and JP rant about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and offer alternatives to use in character creation.
Question of the week: How do you develop your characters in terms of wants and needs? Do you use any other methods that we may not have mentioned? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Beyond Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Why Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Is Wrong
The Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow’s Hierarchy
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends. Welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It’s February 17th, 2022 as we’re recording this. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
I did want to thank our newest patron member, Mary Van Everbroeck. Thank you so much, Mary, for listening to the podcast and for joining us on Patreon.
JP: Yes. Thank you.
Crys: Oh, JP, how has your week been?
JP: So I think it’s been two weeks because of book club. It’s crazy. So yeah, I was in the Ozarks.
And I had a pretty productive two weeks and I am done with the edits to go to the dev edit or diagnostic edit for book three. And I am like 50% through the very quick edits to get to our copy writer. Right now I’m just going through old comments, but it’s going very quickly.
Crys: I’ve been doing a lot more client work the last couple of weeks. One of the things I’ve been doing differently since I got back from my whirlwind trip to New York is when I did that, I gave myself permission to buy some hobby things. And I have not allowed myself any hobby other than like gardening, because that’s very low maintenance once it’s up and going for five entire years.
Five years of writing, it has been all writing, all the time. And then the necessities of life. Reading was my hobby. That was it. And I gave myself permission, and there’s a lot of reasons like why my brain was kind of ready for this because I’ve known for a while that my energy is drained because I have not been allowing myself external hobbies because I’ve always been multi passionate and just loved creating things. So I allowed myself to buy some crocheting supplies and some sewing supplies.
And after our health conversation in the Author Success Mastermind a couple of weekends ago, maybe it was last weekend, I returned to doing a pomodoro timer. Because I realized that the time that I felt most happy with my progress every day was when I was doing regular timers. And I often don’t do a 25 minute Pomodoro. I really like 10 minutes. When I’m feeling really overwhelmed, 10 minutes seems really manageable to me most of the time, sometimes I go as low as five minutes. And I work for that amount of time, and then I’m good.
And I think one of the reasons that is, is that I’m just very aware of where I’m putting my time when I do that versus the day just passing me by as I try to get into like a deep state, and sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. But then the day’s gone regardless.
JP: Yep. Yeah, I 100% agree with that sentiment of having those breaks. And that was a really good talk because it validated that opinion of mine. Just because like it breaks up the day, it makes you realize how your day is progressing, but then it also includes moments of movement.
I do get this sometimes with writing, but not as long. But with art, sometimes I will sit in the same position for eight hours. I am not kidding. And then I will, and it will hurt.
Crys: And you’re like, I’m starving, I’m dehydrated, I have to pee like a mother, and my entire body hurts.
JP: And I don’t know if I’d actually listen to the Pomodoro when I do art, but if I did, then I would be able to one, realize that the day doesn’t just vanish into artwork or two, that I’m actually caring for the physical body that I’m in. Because it’s sometimes rough realizing that I’ve spent too long in one position.
Crys: The meat suit is ours to take care of, not ours to command necessarily.
So between the Pomodoro, one, I’ve been trying to move more to prevent that pain, but two, I’ve also been like putting time onto those hobbies.
And I think one of the things that I’m really liking about the hobbies that I’ve allowed back in my life, which are sewing and crocheting, is that they have visual success markers of completion. Another thing I’ve been doing is I’ve been playing video games with my kid, which we love, and we’ve been completing them, but there’s no visual success marker that kind of sits with you and stays with you after you complete a game, and so you don’t feel the success as much.
But when I crocheted him a cardigan and when I sewed him some pants, like I have visual success markers. He wears them, I see them. I feel joy every time I see them. So I’m really enjoying adding that back into my life. And I think it’s actually helping me with my writing life, one, because success breeds motivation, and that can cross over.
It doesn’t have to be success in this one thing breeds motivation only in that thing. Like it can bleed over into any part of your life. But it also just gives me more of that well filling so that when I come to the work, I have more to draw from.
JP: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I have a huge plastic bin full of yarn that I got from Goodwill for like $5. And it was an incredulous amount of yarn. Yeah, because I had huge crocheting dreams. That’s going to stay over there for now, but that’s definitely something I want to come back to. And your cardigan that you made your son is adorable.
Crys: It’s a very JP-color cardigan. Yeah. For sure. I actually like thought of you as I was doing it, I was like if this were like five times larger, JP would look great in it.
JP: Perfect. I do want to note you also are in the process of making something for your family, or yourself, I don’t know, but it’s a coffee table book.
Crys: Oh yeah. So I did forget about that. I was like, what am I making? I don’t understand.
Yeah. So when I was in New York, my aunt shared with me my great-grandmother’s travel journal from 1925 when she went from New York to Washington, I think they dropped down to Mexico, and it’s falling apart. A couple of pages are already torn or missing, but I took pictures of every single page. And there’s a cute little photograph of them in there with their Model T and I’m putting it into a little coffee table book for my family.
I’m doing one journal entry a day. And I’m doing a few things. One, I’m reading, I’m translating from old timey cursive into words most people can read. I am reading that day’s entry aloud on TikTok. And then I am looking for a historical reference that I can add a little educational bit into the book.
And so for like day one, they stopped at a free travel camp and I was like, what’s a free travel camp? So I researched it, and it turned out that these are camps that cities and towns would create to draw people. Like, the newly mobile public were buying cars to their towns and you could stay for free and set up your tent. And that’s what they did.
I could talk about that forever, but I have a topic that I want to rant on and have been promising, at least us, I don’t know if we’ve mentioned it to the community at large, but I’ve been promising you and I that I would rant on Maslow’s Hierarchy for quite some time.
So I don’t know if we’ll have a question title for this episode because this is really just a full-on rant with some directions to go. But my belief is that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is faulty, and we shouldn’t use it as authors to create characters.
That’s my armature right there.
JP: I’m cool with it. Honestly, like I didn’t really know much about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, being that it’s a pyramid with the base level of need for survival and this top level of self-actualization. Approaching it without knowing anything about it or any of the history about it, it just seems like an easy, straightforward writing tool to consider. But you shared several links with me and I don’t disagree with you. But let’s get into it.
Crys: Yes. And I will probably get long-winded, so please feel free to interrupt me with questions.
Okay. So if you’re not familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy, JP gave the level zero.
So level one, a little bit more information. It is a pyramid, and Maslow said that the bottom level, the first level, is like what humans need to satisfy the needs they need to satisfy before they can even consider like the next level. And he listed it as physiological needs, so like food, sleep, I think he even put sex there.
Two, safety needs, shelter, you have your items that you own secure, et cetera.
Three, love and belonging. So you have intimacy, connection. Four, esteem. And then five, self-actualization. And self-actualization he defined as becoming more of who you’re meant to be or your best self kind of thing.
So there’s some problems with this. Part of this is a list of questions that came from an article that I will put in the show notes, and some of them are ones I created. But first, like one of my first thoughts is okay, where do political or religious self-sacrifices, like self-immolation of bombers, fall when they’re placing esteem or what they view as self-actualization, or even love and belonging, like that connection to their community, above their physiological and safety needs. Like that doesn’t track. Like it doesn’t cover that circumstance.
Maslow would have said that creativity is part of self-actualization So posing the question, then do poor people who do not have necessarily physiological and safety needs, lack of the capacity for creativity or self-pride? I think we can say that’s an absolute no. Like, absolutely not. Being poor requires a lot of creativity. You’re always having to figure out a solution around a problem. It’d be so much easier to handle with money.
JP: And just to jump in on that, with this pyramid and this kind of this discussion, what you’re pointing out is based off of how this hierarchy exists. You need the one before it to progress to the next one. There is no equal ground. You have to basically move up this pyramid. And that’s like our discussion last week was talking about the road, and in the road if we use this hierarchy, we could only meet the love and belonging level because it’s this leveling up.
But I think that, after we’ve discussed this, I think there are elements of that self-actualization, you know, other things in there. So I just wanted to toss in there that as per the definition of this hierarchy, you have to move up. So when I read that one when you were sending me your notes, I was like, ooh, that seems problematic.
Crys: Right? Just a couple more questions along the same lines: is property a more basic need than friendship, family, or sexual intimacy? And does sex always proceed sexual intimacy? According to this pyramid, they would. Not only this, like the logic just doesn’t make sense. There’s really strong evidence that suggests that he was strongly influenced by his time with, and forgive me if I say this wrong, Siksika, also known as the Blackfoot people in the USA.
He took their knowledge, contorted it, and then profited from it, without ever acknowledging their contribution. And from my understanding, the Siksika actually believed, although they don’t have a word for self-actualization in their indigenous language, but they believed that they were born with self-actualization. That you were born who you were meant to be at birth, and it’s not something to be achieved, it’s innate.
Dr. Cindy Blackstock, who is a First Nations member and a researcher, she used another pyramid to help those familiar with Maslow’s work comprehend the Blackfoot and similar indigenous groups’ view a bit more and said that their beliefs were more like the bottom level is self-actualization. And then the second level is community actualization.
So you are who you are and you use that to help the community become more of what the community is supposed to be. And then the top level is then cultural perpetuity. And I interpret that as being like their way of life stays pretty solid and continues to grow and develop and carry on through the generations.
I didn’t put this in the notes, but I think that she referenced something about how the indigenous folks that she was working with and that she’s a part of view that the current generation is influenced by the seven generations previous to it. And that generation will influence the seven generations following.
And that’s a really important part of their view of needs in the world, because you’re not only attending to yourself, you’re not only attending to your community, you’re attending to both the honoring of the past who have contributed to you and the honoring of the future and what you will contribute to them.
JP: Yeah, definitely. And it’s interesting thinking about the history of how this hierarchy of needs came to be, because you basically took two cultures and you had just a mass misinterpretation.
And I looked up Abraham Maslow, who’s the creator of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It was around the 1950s or so, psychology is this blooming field around that time, and it just continues to grow. But it was an attempt at making a cultural belief into a rigid hierarchy structure because hierarchies are a really big thing in the scientific community within the 1800s and 1900s. They want to be able to categorize everything and put it in this, ‘which is better and which is worse’ group. So it’s really interesting to know where it came from and how it was misinterpreted.
Crys: And I think you can see in his interpretation how the cultural value of hyper independence really shows up in the Maslow’s Hierarchy.
JP: Definitely, because even in the middle when you talk about love and belonging, based off of what the definitions are, this is like my connection to others, but it’s not my impact to the community.
It’s all me. It’s all about me. I liked that the origination or like where this came from, the Blackfoot people, that is very community centric and it’s very focused on how will what I do today impact seven generations down the road.
Crys: Yeah. Because unlike Western culture at the time, by at the time, I mean like for about the 200 years surrounding our invasion of the Americas, they really didn’t have a lot of opportunity or reason or desire to up and leave their community the way that Europeans could and did. The people that they lived with were the people they were going to live with their entire lives. So it was very important to their personal needs that the community needs were also met.
JP: Definitely. Definitely.
Crys: Yeah. Maslow’s pyramid fails to take into account the individual in the context of the community. And because of that, we talked about the hyper independence, it also assumes that humans are driven by some level of greed until they possibly overcome once their basic needs are cared for. Which, parents will go hungry in favor of their children, which means they’re choosing love and belonging over physiological needs. And if you think about the number of people who pursue awards, accolades, grades, that esteem level, over food and sleep, it just continues to not line up.
JP: Yeah. And the amount of people who will protest, stand up against injustices, regardless of their own base level needs. People will go on hunger strikes. People will do X, Y, Z. Like that obviously fails to meet this pyramid. So when you’re talking about these big concepts of people that are looking outside of themselves, it fails. As a writer, I’m like, okay, what works?
Crys: So there’s a bunch of alternative theories. And I have a whole list. Like some theories think that needs are acquired through one’s experiences and that everyone is motivated by a different set of needs. That tracks for our assumption that not everyone’s needs are going to be the same cause we’ve listed several options.
I’m going to just list off the types for anyone who wants to research this more and then get into the one that I find the most useful. McClelland’s Human Motivation Theory, Alderfer’s ERG Theory, Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, Murray’s System of Needs, Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory.
But my favorite is from Chilean economist, Manfred Max-Neef, who proposed that human needs are few, finite, and classifiable, as well as interrelated and interactive. So this theory rejects the hierarchy notion completely and instead focuses on a constellation of universal needs that are integrative and additive, which means that they layer over top of each other and the effects of one need will affect the others.
So he had nine. And the needs he listed are idleness, which is relax, subsistence, which is survive, freedom, which is choose, affection, which is love, identity, which is belong, protection, which is protect, understanding, which is understand, creation, create, participation, stand up.
So as fulfillment or lack of one need changes that affects the others. Which means at times we’ll be prioritizing whatever we need, to get groceries at one point, but agonizing over the choice of words and dialogue on the page the day before. One of the other things I really like about the theory is that it discusses how fulfilling one need might have a cost to another need, which is the building blocks of a best, bad, choice or an irreconcilable.
And then last year was, it feels like forever ago and just yesterday, we had that mini conference with Jeff Elkins where we built gender maps and we shared our gender maps here on the podcast and what those look like. And it talks about how gender is more complex than just what we view as physiological sex or chromosomes and talks about all the different elements of gender. And I think that it would be far more representative of reality if we were to create a map of needs for our characters. And you had some really great examples of this.
JP: Yeah. So when I saw this and I was thinking of like, how can I tie theme in? Because this is where our conversation last week or two weeks ago, spawned this conversation of how we need to throw Maslow out the window. And it was, I really liked the concept of needs and I think that there’s a way to pull a theme out of a story by using needs. And either using this as a pre-planning tool so that you know what your needs are as you progress through the story, or as a post-planning as you’re figuring out what your theme was meant to be.
So when I looked at this using the road, the three primary drives out of these nine, and I just use three as an arbitrary number, but I feel like three you can pull more definition out of. So in the road, that would be protection, affection, and subsistence. So that would be the need to protect, the need to love, and then the need to survive.
And in the road that’s reflected when the man is protecting his child, but is also preparing him for a life of survival when the man dies. And it’s all about, I just said it, you use your survival or protection in your love. Like that is the key and core component of that entire story.
And then, I’m like, okay, that’s great, but what does it mean in different stories? So then I was like, okay, Handmaid’s Tale. That’s freedom, participation by means of standing up, and protection. And so when I’m looking at it that way and I’m thinking of, okay, what’s my theme sentence. It’s we cannot protect the ones that we love unless we stand up against our captors and fight for the freedom we deserve. And that to me captures what the Handmaid’s Tale is about, at least the show on Hulu.
And I think that this is a way in which you can use these nine pillars to pick two, three of your like core what are you trying to say? What is your need of your character? What is the need of the story? And figure out what that theme is because to me, that’s how you’re going to be able to drive that story forward is when you know the very strong threads that you can pull on.
Crys: My hope from this episode is for any listeners that when someone recommends that they look at Maslow’s Hierarchy as a helpful tool for building characters, that they will have the same visceral reaction I do of: that is not representative of humanity and therefore makes terrible characters.
JP: Yeah, I didn’t know this. And now I do. And I think too, now that I’ve realized it, like how could I write a character like Van Gogh if I needed to write a story about Van Gogh? He wouldn’t be able to have base level needs, but yet he is highly self-actualized. He wouldn’t fit this pyramid. So then do I just say, okay, it doesn’t fit this pyramid. Well, this tool isn’t good for me. These needs, I don’t need to worry about. Or do we can consider other options and say, okay, needs are important for our character development. Let’s use a different tool that doesn’t break every time we try to do a different character that isn’t standard
It was too fragile. When you pointed it out, I was like, that’s why I didn’t know how to use it. It’s because it was too fragile.
Crys: Yup. Do we have a question for our listeners this week, JP?
JP: Of course we do. How do you develop your characters in terms of wants and needs? And do you use any other methods that we may not have mentioned?
Crys: Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us again this week. If what we share has been helpful to you, I hope that you’ll consider visiting our Patreon and helping us out. Your contributions help us pay for the hosting and the transcription of these episodes. We’ll see you all next week.
JP: See you later.
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