4 Writing Lessons from a Novel Contest Judge

Diane Callahan
8 min readSep 24, 2021

Writing contests are a lot like dating: you have to put yourself out there and brave rejection, but in the end, the most important thing is that you love who you are. To cultivate that sense of writerly self-confidence, here are four writing lessons I learned as a judge for the Page Turner Awards.

Specifically, I judged the Young Writer Award for aspiring authors between the ages of 18…

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