*in response to a text*

I decided to take two different routes to answer my essential question. First I read a book called Go Ask Alice, which I wrote about in a previous blog post, which is advertised as a real diary written by a young girl. While this reads like a diary, I still felt like there was a concrete storyline to it, so I felt like it really helped me find a middle ground of journaling and storytelling. Still, to get more of the “journaling” feel to my writing, I also went through many of my old journals. Most of these were written when I was very young, so I mostly wrote nonsense and whatever came to my mind at the moment, but that also really helped me understand the narrative  and how normal people write, because journaling usually isn’t about telling a story, but about getting your thoughts out.

Reading both of these really helped me with my essential question too. In Go Ask Alice, each character in the story has a vastly different idea and feeling about the events of the book. Just because the main character feels one way about something doesn’t mean everyone else does as well, and that really comes across in the writing. At one point, the narrator expresses guilt and regret at having to sell drugs to middle schoolers, but the people she is doing it with are just fine with it. If the story was written from their perspective, we’d get a completely different story, and this event may not have been even mentioned at all because they care so little about it.