An undergraduate at GMU seeking a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I grew up in the Northern Virginia area and am a lifelong addict to fiction. I also enjoy gaming.
Junior Contributor I
Published | Is it important for video games to have well-written plot and dialogue?Break down how important well-written plot and dialogue are to video games. While obviously pure action games like Smite and Overwatch don't need much of a plot, and nothing resembling dialogue, what about games with a campaign mode? Does steering away from Hollywood cliches, poorly-constructed storylines and so on significantly improve the quality of a game? Or does gameplay/cinematography/etc. always trump the quality of the writing?
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Why Reread Books? The Pros and Cons of Rereading | |
This has always been my favorite classic Star Trek episode, with the possible exception of Galileo Seven. My father introduced me to these shows before I was ten years old, and rewatching them at twenty-one I see them with more sophistication each time. I think the fiftieth anniversary of some of these episodes is a wonderful time to look back over them, to see how far Roddenberry was able to look into the future. With the recent casting of a new actor to play Lenard’s old character of Sarek, I may be coming back to this episode soon–going back into it armed with the research and knowledge from this essay will make the experience all the more enjoyable. | "Balance of Terror": Star Trek, History, and National Security |
After seeing that Lin Manuel-Miranda wrote music for Moana, is engaged to produce “The Kingkiller Chronicle” television series, and having heard pieces of his writing on Last Week Tonight and The West Wing Weekly, I am even more interested in seeing his (perhaps) magnum opus, Hamilton. | Hamilton and the Construction of Post-Obama Americanism |
I find it really interesting that this musical became so popular at, as you put it, the “twilight of the Obama administration and the dawn of the Trump Era.” It has some interesting intersectionality with current events–not only in the form of its content, but I’m sure we all remember when Mike Pence went to see a performance of Hamilton and was directly addressed from the stage (there were some boos from the audience, but I thought the address itself was quite well-mannered and tempered). Lin Manuel-Miranda has proven himself to be quite the musical talent with this piece, but until reading this piece I had no idea the extent to which he had captured the authentic American spirit in it. Listening to the album, it seems, will not be enough–I must find some way to see Hamilton before it ends. | Hamilton and the Construction of Post-Obama Americanism |
I am a chronic re-reader of books that I love, but low-quality books I often read once and then never again–or I get halfway through, am dismayed that I have wasted my life in such a manner, and switch to something else. The Lord of the Rings, for example, I had to reread a few times just to get through it–I was bogged down halfway through the first book, then again halfway through the second, then finally managed to tough it out through book three. Tolkien’s writing is very high-level stuff, and I took something different out of the book each time. High-level writing is like that–the reread becomes more about you than about the book, about the different places that you the reader are coming from. You catch things that you missed the first time around and realize how much you have learned in the intervening time. For me, this is one of the most important purposes of rereading: how have I grown such that my experience of this book is different than the first time?