On Poverty

I wrote a while ago that I tend to write stories about people who actually have money, and I found that interesting considering that I don’t have a whole lot. However, another group of people that I write some about is people who scrap by. Not surprisingly, I give these characters very middle class view points, as that’s about all I’ve had. (And lower middle class at that.)

Then, last Wednesday, we talked in class about poverty and the mindset of poverty. Because of the reflection that I needed to write for that class, I found an article that compares the classes. This is from a book called A Framework for Understanding Poverty. It actually sounds like a very interesting book, although that many one star reviews do bother me slightly on the validity of that, so I’d look into reviews before you rush off to buy.

It does, however, give us writers a chance to start thinking about the mindset of other people. It’s easy to create a mindset of all middle class characters, but by even looking at the differences between classes, that is presented in a nice little table here, it can give us more ideas about how to rework mindsets for our characters.