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Dialogue and Concision: A Writing Critique
Have you ever looked back at your old writing to see how you’ve grown? Recently, I was looking back through a novel I wrote in high school and was surprised by how much could be cut without changing the story. Characters stop to order drinks, engage in pleasantries, say things we say in real life…
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Rotating Perspective and Unreliable Narrator: A Writing Critique
In middle school, I was addicted to K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs series, especially its use of rotating first-person. I incorporated this technique into all my writing including my high school novel Grayscale. Let’s take a peek back to see what we can learn from this attempt. In rotating first-person, it’s important to make each character’s…
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Choose Your Own Science
Last week, Wired reported that, “a team of scientists in China have used a cutting-edge CRSPR technique to repair a disease-causing mutation in viable human embryos.” Aldous Huxley would be proud (or perhaps terrified). Whatever your feelings about the future of gene editing, we can all agree that articles like this are great fodder for…
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3 Tips for Beating Writer’s Block
You’ve got your whole afternoon blocked off for writing. You’ve just gotten off work, turned off your phone and found a quiet place to spend some quality time with your keyboard. You take a deep breath, open MS Word, and… Two hours later, you don’t know where the time went but it certainly didn’t go…
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How I Learned to Write Good (and Bad) Flash Fiction
Flash fiction can be a great place for new writers to start. It’s a lot easier to perfect a one page story than a 1,000 page epic, after all. Given that, it should come as no surprise that we get a lot of flash fiction at Belmont Story Review. What is surprising, however, is just how…