Canwen Xu

this person named Laura Kim.

And then this goes back to what I said about emotional truth, because one thing that was really important to me when writing this character was I think it can be easy to just fiat your way into saying this character is a sociopath.

All her motivations can be explained by the fact that she's a sociopath.

She just doesn't think like normal people.

She's just weird.

And you can kind of let yourself, you can basically have your reader just, gosh, what's that term where it's like, oh, suspension of disbelief.

Basically, you just make that the suspension of disbelief for your reader.

This person's just psychologically different from everyone else.

But I wanted it to be that all of her actions are kind of explainable, just in a very twisted way.

So even though she probably is a sociopath, that isn't the thing that explains all of her behavior.

So that was something really important to me when writing this character.

And I think the reason that I cared so much about that was I still wanted her to be a relatable college student, even though she clearly has a lot of issues.

I think that she really just has a heightened version of what many people at this point of their life feel, you know, they feel like they're constantly comparing themselves to others, they feel all of this pressure to

to find their place in the world.

So all of those kind of were my drivers for creating this character.

And then this also goes back to, again, emotional truth.

So I essentially took out the worst, most toxic parts of myself.

And I was like, what if, you know, I blew up like the tiny seed of, you know, let's say I feel jealous sometimes.

I just really blew that up.

So it's still that truth, but just a magnified version of it.