What have you learned that begins to answer your essential question?

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

Throughout the course of this project, I think that I have learned a lot about my essential question. At first, the answer seemed very simple to me; different people have different stories to tell. Especially since me and Anna are placing our characters in drastically different situations. I thought answering the question would be easy. But throughout the process of writing my journal and working with Anna to develop our characters, I’ve realized that the answer to our essential question is actually a lot more complicated.

Everybody tells stories differently because different things matter to different people. Even if Anna and my characters were in the same place in a similar situation, they would tell different stories, not because they experienced different things but because different things stand out to different people. My character is very worried about the pandemic going on, especially because she’s really in the thick of things, so she writes about it in her journal a lot more than she writes about anything else. Anna’s character, however, is the opposite; she doesn’t like to dwell on the sadder things, so she doesn’t write about it. This means Anna’s journal comes out more like a place to vent, and mine comes out more as a retelling of days events. Our stories come out much differently, not just because our characters are in different places geographically, but because we care about different things.