Hanna and I have made significant progress in the development of our characters and their journals. We will begin working on the communicative portion of the project once we have fully brought the characters to life. I think I have already discovered some answers to our essential question: “How are stories changed based on the perspective from which they are told?” The obvious answer is that each character has their own experiences that will cast a unique light on any events or circumstances they encounter. Realistically, no two people are exactly the same, so to illustrate the experiences of two fictional characters, the same logic must be kept in mind.
There are also several questions beneath the surface of the essential question. Some examples are as follows: What is the role of the setting? How can we best develop our characters? What is a co-authored piece going to look like for our writing purposes? How can we tell this story in an unconventional format? Most of these questions we do not have the answers to as of yet, but with the added level of reading published works similar to our own, we will ascertain ideas and a better understanding on the road to answering our essential question.
I took LREI’s memoir writing workshop class in the fall, which inspired a significant part of the project: the character journal. I would not classify this component of the project as a fictional memoir piece, but it definitely incorporates some aspects of the genre. I am not familiar with writing in the letter format, though, which is something I hope to learn about from reading examples. Ultimately, authors have reasons for whichever format(s) they choose to write in, and I am curious to find out if and why this unique format lends itself to the content of our writing.
Anna, I think this project is so cool for how it tackles a really “old” literary form (novel in journal/letters) and thinks about how to update it for the present. My research background is in 18th century literature, so it’s interesting to me how this seems to combine two “canonical” works of early 18th century British literature: Daniel Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year” (a fictional journal about the great plague / great fire of 1665/1666, written about forty years later) and Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa” (a novel in letters that are more like journal entries at times – two of the main correspondents are young women who write to each other about their lives when separated by distance). One question I have – are you hoping that the final project will contain a plot with conflict, climax, and resolution? Or will it be a more reflective work overall, less “action-oriented” and directed more to following the ebb and flow of characters’ mental lives… Or some combination of the two?!