The Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Short Story Collection (Let’s Work on that Title)
The work is Beginning!
As we did this past year with the Halloween collection (if you've no idea what I'm talking about, there's a link here), we're putting together a short story collection to come out in ebook and print at the end of the year or in early 2026. All in our group may participate; no one is required to participate. If you want to get in on the fun, just write a short story that adheres to the theme. What is that theme? Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We'll have to massage that a little for public consumption, yes. It goes like this, and you can look it up, too:
Psychologist Abraham Maslow, way back the 1940s, conceptualized a structure of needs and goals that govern all human behavior. From most basic to most complex, it goes like this:
1. Physiological (bodily) Needs that is, the need for food, shelter, water, warmth, basically all the animal needs. Humans need to attain these things before they can strive for any higher desires
2. Safety Needs as in, once you can breathe, eat, and not freeze to death, you focus your efforts on the desire to be safe. Safe from physical, economic, or environmental harm. Building a bomb shelter, joining a gang, and having a savings account could all be considered filling the need for safety. You can't strive to fulfill higher needs until you feel safe.
3. Belonging and Love Needs everybody wants to belong. Okay, almost everybody wants to belong. That's why people all go to the same stadium to view an eclipse though they can all see it just a clearly from their own back yards. That's why people join churches, lodges, and sewing circles. The need to belong goes a long way to explaining the table situation in a high school cafeteria. The nerds huddled over there, the jocks over there, the goths over there. Sometimes, the need to belong overwhelms the bodily needs and the need for safety.
4. Esteem Needs everyone wants to feel good about themselves. There are two levels to this, the need to be respected, trusted, and admired by others and the need to respect oneself. If you feel ostracized, hated, or ignored, or if you pretty much hate yourself, things don't go well. Also, starting at this level in the hierarchy of needs, things get pretty muddy. All the needs from here on tend to mix and mesh rather than being strictly separated by importance.
5. Cognitive Needs people want meaning. They want to know stuff, to comprehend the world around them. It doesn't matter if they get at any real truth or facts, they just want to construct a satisfying story that makes sense of their existence. That's why people heavily into religion, science, and conspiracy theories are all fulfilling their needs to understand and know the world.
6. Aesthetic Needs people need to take what they "know" of the world and themselves and re-imagine it into something beautiful that they create or interpret. In other words, we need to tell ourselves stories that may or may not be based in reality but that sound pretty good to us. You know, bullshitting. That's how some people can tell themselves that the wonderful purpose of man is to subjugate nature, and other people can tell themselves that the greater existence for man is to run naked through the forest and just, you know, see what happens. It also accounts for art, but what the hell is that? After achieving the cognitive level finds us smart enough to comprehend the world or dumb enough to think we do, the aesthetic level prompts us to mode the world we perceive into the world we, uh, want to perceive.
7. Self-actualization Needs at this point, humans want to be all that they can be. Like that guy in Crime and Punishment wanted to become his greatest self by ax murdering those two random women. Or somebody becomes President. Take your pick. In other words, we want to achieve our greatest destiny, whatever we perceive that to be.
8. Transcendence this gets to the wooly, pyramid crystal, meditative, high on pot level of human experience. It's where Dave (or the other guy, I can't recall) goes into the monolith and becomes one with the universe. It's where you learn that everything you've strived for to this point is pretty petty and you learn to see how other people see things, what really is the best course of action or inaction for the greatest good whether or not it works out for you. It's Tony Stark snapping his fingers, Thor finally becoming worthy of his hammer, Peter realizing that Jesus kind of knew what he was talking about, and Gandhi just being born. Transcendence is when you finally decide, without hesitation, to put yourself out there for everyone you love, everyone you don't even know and have never met, for all species, for the Earth, the galaxy, and the cosmos no matter the cost to you.
Okay, that's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. For the sake of our upcoming collection you pick one and write a story around it. Whatever kind of story you want.
Requirements
—Length of submissions. We haven’t settled on that yet. Last time we had work varying from a few lines to 14,000 or so words.
—Try to have your first draft finished by the end of April. Then we'll have a mechanism set up whereby you can upload your story for others in the group to critique so that you can have guidance for your second, third, and so on drafts. You can also run the story through the regular critique process. You can even do both. The important thing is that you work on and revise so that the story is its best by...
—The hard deadline of the end of August. Submit the final by that time (we'll tell you how later, when we figure that out). After the end of August there will be NO further stories accepted for the collection. We're in formatting preparation by then. Also NO FURTHER REVISIONS will be accepted after this deadline.
—How many stories can you submit? We don't know; we'll see when they come in. But if you submit 30 stories and we say, wait, 3 is enough, you can always query those others to other publications.
—Lastly, we need a name for our needs collection. Start thinking. Some suggestions already:
1. Crave
2. Longing
3. The Terrace of Necessities
4. The Wanting Collection
5. Things We Seek
6. Everybody Wants Something
Can’t find the author’s email?
Stephan Loy stephanloy@yahoo.com
Michael Siegert siegertjr.jason@gmail.com
Jeff Turner jeffrey.richard.turner@gmail.com
Jane Hartsock hartsockj@gmail.com
Michael Murray m.owenmurray@gmail.com
Linda Samaritoni lindasamaritoni@gmail.com
Sasha Virjee sashavirjee@gmail.com
Subodhana Wijeyeratne docsubster@gmail.com
John Grimes jgrimes@iquest.net
Jerry Land iu76jrl@gmail.com
Brooklyn Parnell bklynparnell@gmail.com
Cate Radebaugh cate.radebaugh@gmail.com
Kacy Allgood kacyallgood@gmail.com
Liz Feldman lizfeldman614@gmail.com
Trevor Melton trevor.w.melton@gmail.com
Rich Wells fakerichwells@gmail.com
Haley Carter hmcarterauthor@gmail.com
Mak Ukusare makkusare@gmail.com