For my Narrative 2 research paper in English, I explored Voodooism, focusing on how communication with spirits works and the ways people connect with the supernatural. This research directly influenced my group’s worldbuilding project, where we incorporated those ideas into one of the core rules of our world. In our story, ghosts communicate through signet rings, which was inspired by what I learned about spiritual connection and symbolic objects. This added a unique tone and deeper meaning to our narrative, making the world feel more intentional and immersive. Throughout the unit, we also read texts such as The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and the novel 1984 by George Orwell, which helped us understand different approaches to worldbuilding and storytelling. We began by drafting a rough concept as a group, and I worked with Chris and Luca to develop our idea. We decided to center our story around a mafia family that uses ghosts to carry out their crimes, creating moral conflict within the narrative. Our main character is the son of the mafia boss, who struggles with his father’s corruption and ultimately must decide how he wants to live his own life.
This research inspired our overall plot of the story, which led to the pitch presentation for the final product, shown below. This project was especially interesting because of the creative freedom we had to design any kind of world we wanted. It was rewarding to see my research not just stay on paper, but actually shape the story and play an important role in how our world functioned.