Recent Future, Near Past

A thought crossed my mind: When you’re only thinking about where your next meal is coming from, you can only think back to your last meal. I have never been in such a position, I won’t assert this is true, yet it cuts me. The higher thoughts I take for granted would likely evaporate in a survival situation. A frightening prospect.

Such undesirable hypotheticals have led me back to the first standard by which I analyzed my characters: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Some fifteen years ago I thought a lot less of the people in my stories and more what they were doing. Chiefly this involved car chases, gunfights, and all manner of scenes cribbed from action movies and TV. My brain was still developing and at the heart of things I was practicing my craft (I’ll be as tough on myself as need be). The scientific methodology made sense as a universal measuring stick. A real one size fits all solution to what does this person want. When you’re fresh it makes a good crutch.

Many plot devices can be quickly shown (or told, inexperience may favor the latter) to simply move the story forward. The character is hungry. There’s a chicken to catch. Sure it’s conflict, the chicken has as great a self-preservation instinct, but who cares? Either they do or they don’t. Move onto the next.

Over a decade later I took a few characters, some children, and dragged them through the mud. They lost their family, home, savings, clothes, knocked down from adjacent squalor to abject poverty. The old thought of Maslow’s Hierarchy flashed before me. That’s how a good lesson sticks with you, all at once you realize you’re applying it to a novel situation. The twist on it helped me realize how far I’d come as a writer. I wasn’t focused on how they were reduced to the lowest level of need, mere survival. Instead, I was drawn to their resilience and pursuit of a grand dream of getting out of poverty for good. They’d own a farm or a shop, have a little piece of the world that was theirs. A place where no one could hurt them. No one ruled over them.

They didn’t outright say that, I had enough sense at that point to retain subtlety. My interest shifted onto the incredible resolve humanity is capable of in crushing times. It was an arc of how that mentality and hope can carry a person through hardship but then scar them outside those circumstances leaving a person incapable of perceiving the world as anything but a threat to conquer. Even with the farm they were too narrowed on the next goal to be emotionally present for another’s passing. Strife, especially when undergone in youth, can metastasize in the soul.

Sometimes sheer determination lets us survive. Other times it’s a crutch. There’s no equilibrium in that mode. We aspire in desperation and revert in plenty. Can’t face reality either way.