How has your essential question changed throughout the 6 weeks?
What did you expect to learn and how does that compare to what you did learn?
How do you anticipate this experience changing you or affecting you going forward?
What do you most want others to know about your SP experience?
Before Covid-19 and the quarantine, Anna and I planned to go to Palm Springs together to explore how stories change based on setting and how it’s told. We planned to tell one story in two different ways — through writing and through photography — and study what differences were portrayed and what different information we could tell through these different outlets. Our original essential question was: How can the same story be told in multiple ways? But because of the quarantine, I couldn’t travel to Palm Springs with Anna, and doing a photography project to mirror her writing became a lot more difficult. Instead we modified our project, and instead decided to focus on the perspective change; Anna and I would both write a story about the same general events, but from the perspective of different characters. Our essential question became our original idea’s sub-question: How can different mediums and factors of storytelling (e.g., photography, writing styles, formats, social media, settings, perspectives, etc.) change a story?
I think my perception of our essential question changed throughout the process of Senior Project, but not the question itself (except for some clarifications). Our essential question was pretty simple: how does a story change based on the perspective from which it’s told? I expected the answer to be simple as well: of course the story is different, because the person telling it is different. Our stories would be different simply because Anna is in Palm Springs and I am in New York. But there are a lot more layers to what the differences are and mean than just that. I’ve written about this a lot in previous CRs, but as Senior Project has gone on I’ve realized that the story changes much more because of the way the writer writes, not just the perspective/setting of the character. For instance, if I were to write both Natalie and Astrid’s journals, even if I tried to change my language, I don’t think they would have turned out that different because my writing style will still stay the same and I would have a hard time not mentioning similar things. In that case, especially if the two perspectives are within the same story and readers are reading them together, it will be much more useful to use two different people to write and tell the stories, so that the characters are easily differentiated.
Still, Anna and I have had similar experiences and have spent the better part of six years in the same place, experiencing similar things. Because of this, some of our language was similar. To differentiate our characters even more, we had to drastically change the course of our storyline and create different conflicts for the two characters. This really helped in creating a distinct voice for each of our characters and made the story more interesting because it gave it more depth and layers to analyze. I also think it made us less worried about mentioning the same things in each of our journals.
Ultimately, Anna and I were able to create a lot of good content and produce a coherent and interesting story. I am very proud of the work we have done and that we were able to jump obstacles, keep each other on task, and help each other when needed. I have learned that I can keep self-set deadlines if I put my mind to it, and I would like to do something similar in the future.