Essential Question: How are stories changed based on the perspectives from which they are told? 

Something that I’ve found really hard to do while writing my journal entries is give my character a sense of reality and not just write about days events as if the reader were there for it all, instead of my character recounting it from the past. Because I’m mostly thinking of the events as I write, the I feel like the writing feels more like a narration than a journal. To fix this, I decided to take a look back at the many old journals I used to write in when I was younger.

I don’t really write journals anymore, except for a few over the summer or when I’m on a vacation, but I used to write a lot when I was in middle school. Reading over these journals was like reading them for the first time because I haven’t read them since I wrote them. I can put a lot of the entries in context because I can remember the event they’re written about, but some others are confusing to me because I only wrote about what I felt, or skipped between events during the day.

Through reading my old journals, I realized that in my current story, I’m spending too much time on facts instead of emotions. Journals aren’t always completely coherent stories, instead they are whatever the writer thinks is important, or how they feel, especially if they feel particularly strongly about something– and this defines who the character telling the story is. What happened may stay the same, but what stands out as important is different to everyone. I think I need to add more personality to my journal, but at the same time I can’t abandon the storytelling aspect because this is supposed to be a real story, not just a journal.