So far, Anna and I have worked mostly on our own, not really communicating with each other after getting down the basics of what where we want our story to go. I think I have come to some understanding of our main question: “How are stories changed based on the perspective from which they are told?” I knew, even before starting the project, that stories would be different based on who was telling them because Anna’s telling her story from all the way across the country, so obviously a pandemic and even a quarantine would look drastically different simply because of the setting; her grocery store is further away, there are less people, she has a yard to go into, etc.

What I have come to understand through this project so far is that not everyone worries about or even notices the same things– what is important to my character may not be important at all to Anna’s, or vice versa. For instance, the emptiness of the streets might seem like a big difference to me, in the city, but not to Anna because her streets are relatively empty anyway. Similarly, two things might be very important to both characters, but present themselves in different ways. Both character’s might worry about food, but Anna’s worries about getting to a grocery store and mine worries about whether there’s any food left.

I would like to develop this understanding even more. I think that the two examples I gave are pretty obvious ones, and I want to see what, given the circumstances, Anna finds more important for her character than I do. Because our writing is journal-style, only the most important and critical moments will be shown, since generally people write more about the stuff that’s bothering them than the more insignificant moments. I want to see what setting and perspective and even character traits change the importance of life events.