Goodreads asked Lois Metzger:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Lois Metzger This is something I discovered by accident. When I first started out, I wrote the diaries of three characters. Every day, I wrote about what had happened to them that day, sometimes telling the same event three different ways. When I was in college, I wanted to enter a short-story contest, so I wrote a story about these three characters. The story felt ready-made because I already knew the characters so well. This is what I would recommend, to write the diaries, or the journals, or the blogs, anything that gets at the inner lives of your characters. In my case, the diary entries came to hundreds of pages, and the story was only 11 pages. I won $50.

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