Blog Post #1

Starting my journey through the research process, I have many tasks to complete. To divide them up, my first task was to create the most profound pinpoint of human thought: a question.

At the initialization of my research, my original question was based around an idea of religious themes in various different forms of literature or films. A religious theme would be anything in the book or movie that had the same ideals or stories as that of a religion such as Hinduism, Christianity, or Buddhism. It can also be a theme that depicts certain aspects of a religion of an author's choice. However, due to the broadness of this topic, I came to the conclusion that it would be interesting to look at just fictional books and research any religious themes in those.

Continuing on in my journey, I wanted to research the ways that an author's religious background impacted their storytelling and the premise of the plot of their stories. This led me to my first question: “How Does An Author’s Religion Impact Their Books?” As I was doing my research, I realized that I would not be able to do further studying on this topic due to the fact that there was no gap, therefore it would be difficult to do original or personal research on this particular topic.

Reaching the peak of my questionnaire journey, I decided that my question would need to be modified at an even greater extent in order to appeal to the forefront of the human imagination. As most of the research I saw in various articles was done on Christianity, I decided to go with that route. This changed my question to “How Does Christianity Play A Role In Fictional Novels and Their Plots?” I continued to search for other research that had been done previously about this topic and found copious amounts of research on Christian themes in countless fictional novels. I began to look for the gap in the research and found that most articles never mentioned which stories or themes from Christianity were present in the novel. I thought this would be a good research topic due to the fact that it presented a gap between a topic that would be interesting to research and a topic that had already been researched thoroughly.

After going through this process and finishing the first task in my journey, my finalized question is “What Christian Themes or Stories are Most Referenced In Different Young Adult Fiction Novels and What Impact Do These Make on the Overall Plot?”