To what extent do we have free will?

For my big question this year I decided to ask my question on how much free will a person really has. At first I was going to phrase to "Do we have free will?" but after the discussion we had in class I decided that free will worked more as a spectrum than a simple yes or no answer. There are a lot of things that can effect how much say we have in the choices we make, and a lot of things that effect how we make these choices.

I did a project on this several years ago for my American Literature Honors class Sophomore year, and although I put in a good amount of thought into answering this question there is just so much more on this topic to explore. I had another website created, that was super-duper pretty but unfortunately it got blocked by the school the school fire wall so I was forced to use blogger instead (a case for free will being limited perhaps). 

Although this blog will be probably consist of majority literary references as it is for a literature class I do want to include opinions from outside sources. I already have a good collection of them on my other  blog and will eventually add that information over as well as add new sources that I discover throughout the year.

I'm looking forward to exploring this age old question. Hopefully the stories we read with enlighten me to new ways of looking at the idea of free will and hopefully reading these discussions will enlighten you on this topic as well.