Me and my mom were in the kitchen, having breakfast together.  She and my dad were talking to me about transferring back to my old brick-and-mortar school, which had a better curriculum than my current school but was filled with people who would not stop swearing and made inappropriate conversation.  My mom is pretty convinced that I should go back anyway, making this argument:

“That’s how kids are at your age.  As a writer, you are a student of human nature.  To study childhood and adulthood but miss out on adolescence would impact your writing negatively.”

… Or something like that.  I’m just paraphrasing here.

This made me think because even if it felt like it was obvious, I hadn’t really thought about it that way before and I didn’t really think much of it at all, because it seemed obvious.  I need to study humans because otherwise, I won’t have anything to draw on to make good characters.  It was something I learned early on but never gave much thought to.

How do you study human nature?  Do you just… Stare at people?  Nah, can’t be it.  People-watching is probably a good place to start, though.  You could also argue that you could just watch a vlog, read a blog, or read a book about the topic, but those are inadequate because even if a person didn’t realize that they were being video-taped, written about, etc. the vlogger/blogger would probably omit stuff for the sake of condensing the information into something digestible.  Reading a book is inadequate because humans spread a much wider spectrum than is just covered by the average book/philosophical essay.

I would also have to look in places where many different kinds of people frequent.  Places like a grocery store or a mall, where lots of people come to do their shopping because people need to eat, and a mall caters to all sorts of customers.  Just sitting in a library and looking at people would only show you a small portion of the population, which happens to like books and have the ability to stay quiet for long periods of time.  You wouldn’t see anyone who just didn’t like to read for whatever reason, or the person who was die-hard against books because they’re too old fashioned for their taste.

So, I think this would be a good direction to go to study humans:

1. Pick place where there are lots of people.
2. Go to place / w book or other thing.
3. Sit in back of room.
4. Watch people.

I don’t know.  I honestly have no idea what I’m talking about because this isn’t really something I took seriously before. ._. But, uh… Thoughts?

Thanks for listening, anyway, and have a nice day. 🙂