Draft for Research Project .

Britt Grady Jr.
Dr. Chandler
Research in Language & Literature
Research Project
Before you even begin writing a novel, an author should first strongly develop his or her characters, settings, and plot. In doing so there are a lot of things that you should take into consideration. For my focus I focused on a particular city which was Elizabeth, NJ. With this city I looked at the community and the people who live in it. In addition to the general sense I would also look at different age groups, family life, levels of education, different jobs and the different people that others in the community look up to. All of these factors allow me to create a realistic and interesting novel for my reader. This takes away from the work being one dimensional, which no author wants.
For me personally I am a reader. I love sitting back with a really good book to read. All of my favorite books have that fiction feel to it but they are also very realistic. They allow me to get lost in the story and also recognize with it. This is due to the fact that authors spend so much time developing and working on ideas and all that goes into creating a novel. When people think about writing a book, they think it is very easy. They think that a person just begins to write and that is it. But they fail to realize all the work and research that goes into a novel.
As far as my research goes I wanted to use interviewing and ethnography as my main methods of choice. But while discussing my project with a fellow classmate, she referred me to oral history. My classmate suggested this method because for a novel that I am already working on it is about two young brothers. One is dealing with his sexuality and the other dealing with becoming a teen parent. She explained that by them telling and explaining their lives and the things they went through not only is it interviewing but is in fact oral history. These three methods are extremely beneficial to my research.
For ethnography this method involves me looking at a group of people as a whole. I would be looking at how they interact with one another, the different actions they partake in and intently watching basically everything that they do. Ethnography gives me the opportunity to sit back, look at people and take in everything. I’d be able to take their mannerisms and base characters off of them, to make them as realistic as possible. When conducting ethnography there is so much to pay attention to for your research. You have to pay close attention to how they talk, if how they talk changes when talking to different people, their body language, the fashion in which they dress amongst other things. For my ethnographic research I would not want the people that I’m watching them to know that I’m doing so. I say this because if someone knows that you are watching them they will not fully be themselves. I would go to a location where I know that my target audience that I wanted to focus on would be and conduct research undetected.
Interviewing and Oral History go hand in hand as far as my research topic goes. I chose interviewing because in addition to getting the general sense of a specific people as I would with ethnography, interviewing would allow me to go a little deeper. Using the novel that I am working on as an example, I would interview someone who has had troubles dealing their sexuality and someone who has experienced being a teenage parent. This would give even more insight on what it is like, rather than solely depending on statistics. I would also want to interview people from the particular city that I chose to focus on. With that interview I would ask the following; How do people in the community act? If there is, how much violence is there in the community? Which age groups are the main ones involved in the violence? Do different levels of education factor as to whom in the community does what? What are the family dynamics like? What kind of people look up to others in the community? (ex: Do young boys without a father look up to the “dope boys” or drug dealers in the community?) How is it living in this city?.
I feel that by asking these questions I would gain a better understanding of the city itself. It would allow me to create a realistic setting for my novel.