People's needs

People are paradoxes. They want security and adventure. They want to belong to groups and to be free individuals. They want to be well known and respected, but also to have privacy. They often want to have power and authority but not always to have responsibility that goes with it. They want to love and be loved, yet not have commitments. They want the wisdom of age with the fun of youth.

In most cases, our lives are a trade of between what we want and what we can get. If what we get is reasonably close to what we want, then we feel we are lucky. Stories involve these fundamental feelings, and are shown in the characters acts and attitudes.

Quite often what we want is not what other people want us to have. A wealthy father might want his son to learn and take on the family business, while the son might want to be free to do something quite different. The choice might then be whether he does what he wants, and loses his inheritance, or gives up his interests to please his father.

The family of a girl might want her to marry someone of the family's race and religion or beliefs, but she might want to marry someone outside of those. She then has to make a choice between the two.

Again, she might be married but wants to continue pursuing her work career, while her husband might want her to stay at home.

Another woman might be ambitious and want her husband to be more successful, whereas he might be unhappy pursuing success for the sake of it.

These are typical conflicts, where the main character has a no-win choice, and is forced into an unhappy situation.

		Write out some possible choices for the following situations: 1. A girl wants to go to university but she has a mother who is ill and needs her to care for her. 2. A policeman discovers his brother is a criminal. 3. A man discovers his children are not his own. 4. The husband of a woman's closest friend says he loves her.

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