I am on a lifelong journey to better understand myself and humanity. When I 1st started writing at 15 I started people watching. This taught me a good deal about people and how to read body langue. Despite people seeing me differently I will always be mentally that awkward teenage boy who didn’t get social normalities. Even now I do struggle with understanding others. For example, when I see something they don’t and despite telling them of what I see they ignore it and often it leads to an issue for them that was avoidable. This is a very human characteristic that we all seem to share.
Being able to read people and what their body movements could mean is often a bad thing. The art is imperfect and can be misread by the person. The Complexity that is humanity is amazing but emotions are often hard to read without context. As a writer, I study people down to their movements to understand the mechanics of the human body and how emotions can affect the body so to better write how a body moves to the artists I work with and how to convey emotion in my writing through body langue.
Human nature is very complicated but there are some truths that are worth studying. I suggest you do research on the subject but warn you that it will begin to expose people to you. You will see people lying to you and hiding things. You will pick up on subtle movements and it can affect your relationships. So understand this knowledge will leave an effect on you but I believe as a writer or creator it will expand your horizons and lead you to more compelling art and storytelling.
Now the 1st thing you can do which is very effective is to go to very busy public places usc as Gyms, supermarkets, malls etc. or during your normal travels throughout your day, begin to pay attention to how people interact with the world around them and being to build understandings. To help you leapfrog in understanding I suggest these two books, that have been mind opening to me on this subject:
The E. I. 2.0 truly opened my eyes to how badly I have conducted my self in the past. I now have a much better understanding of my self and going foward it will allow me to be a better humanto those around me. This is because it breaks down the steps or rather the mis-steps we often take in life.
This book has truly changed my life. Seriously, it is a way to upgrade your own meatal programming and to put fixes in place for the times you need them the most. I have this on audio and have listened to it over 10 times. I will also make my son listen to it as he grows up.
As Creative people, we are constantly challenged to not only capture the human condition but to present in a compelling story. As someone who has reviewed over 200+ indie comic books the one major issue I constantly see is dialogue. The characters become bland and play into the roles they were made for too perfectly due to their dialogue. The Writer is too busy creating the story and forgets to make the characters human or whatever alien race they are. Now some of this is due to what I believe is that the writer is trying to only use the characters to tell his or her story. But as a Writer, you have to remember the Characters are the bigger story. You have to make those people who show up on the panel as real as possible. You want readers to have an emotional response to the characters so they continue on with the story. If you make them flat and bland that will never happen and people may never finish your story.
I write this as someone who had a publishing offer at 16 and threw it away, actually brunt it. Why? Because when I reread what I wrote I actually cried. It was awful. If published it would have ruined me. I clearly did not understand life. After the proofread I proclaimed to myself that I would give up writing, but truthfully I knew I wasn’t done. I knew that to be the writer I wanted to be I needed to better understand life and humanity. Now at 40, I am writing things that I am truly proud of. I am not saying it takes 40 years. But to make compelling works of art you need to be able to make characters that are 3-dimensional and full of their own unique personality. As a Writer/Creator, you need to study what makes people tick and then be able to impose those traits into your characters so the characters begin to answer how they would react to a situation in your mind and you won’t have to tell them how they Should. That is how great stories are made, the characters write their own dialogue because as the writer you have created them to be an individual full of traits, NOT just cardboard cutout made to fit a role for your story.
Reading the books I suggested along with everyday interactions with people and watching them is one of the best tools creators have better known as observational skills.