I spent most of the first few days of Senior Project  conducting character development exercises to figure out exactly who my character was. This was difficult for me largely because I didn’t have a preexisting idea of the character beforehand — I knew the situation she was in, and I knew a lot of her experiences would reflect mine, but I didn’t want my character to be me. This was difficult to navigate because I had to imagine how a different person might react in a situation I was in. It’s easy to write how I felt and what I did in a certain situation, but I wanted to challenge myself by creating a completely different character from me.

The first character exercise I completed was mostly biographical information — age, hair color, eye color, height — and while it would have been nice to change my character’s appearance a bit to fit how I imagined her, I had keep her physical traits more or less like mine so I could include photos of myself without altering my actual appearance. The second exercise, however, was about the character’s relationships, likes, dislikes, and other details that, to me, make a character more realistic. And to create a character unlike me, I reversed many things about myself just to distance her from me so my journal doesn’t end up being my own journal. In the end, I had a pretty good idea of who my character was, and several pages of details that I can slowly add in to my story.