Week 5 Writing Journal Entry

Why did you choose the character you did for your piece?

For this piece, I took inspiration from Jane Austen’s novels. Jane Austen does a wonderful job of creating complex characters, particularly female characters, who have to struggle through the pains of society in 18th century England. This helped me design my character, Katherine, an unmarried, lower-middle class girl in her early 20s who must marry well for the sake of her family.

What are some of the challenges you found in creating a convincing, complex character?

I think one of the biggest challenges in writing about Katherine was to create an internal conflict that was convincing. I wanted to make her dilemma believable without it being inaccessible to the reader. It was also very difficult for me not to use dialogue. The only dialogue in my piece is dialogue of Katherine’s, as no one else speaks throughout the entire story. For me, dialogue is a big part of how I show things about a character in order to make them convincing. It is also very difficult to keep the reader interested without dialogue.

When designing your character, did you attempt to offer the reader something familiar, unsettling/unusual, or a combination of the two? Why did you make this choice and what mechanisms did you employ to achieve this goal?

I used a combination of things that were familiar to the reader and things that were unusual in designing my character. Of course, the parts that are unusual about my character are everything about the time period in which she lives. I chose a time period that is unfamiliar to the reader because I find it interesting to learn about how people lived during a different time. These historic aspects can be fairly successful in drawing in the reader. However, I chose to employ some things about Katherine that were familiar to the reader, since you need the reader to be able to relate to your character in some way. For this, I wrote about the pressures of family and of society, a topic with which many of us are familiar. These topics span the centuries, as they can cause constant struggles that humans have to deal with every day.