Marian Mathews Clark, author of These Doors and Sixty-Something and Flying Solo, shares how, in the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, Marian took a revision class from Jane Smiley, where the participants wrote four drafts of their stories. Marian worked on a story about a foster sister but couldn’t pin it down. With each version, instead of getting closer to pinning it down, she just kept switching it to another voice and another angle. It wasn’t until later that she decided to tell it from the foster sister’s point of view and was finally able to write it.

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