Mentors

[Patrick]

Does anyone have any first or second hand experience with mentors, good or bad?  When I first heard of writing mentors I thought Great, that's what I need to help bring my writing the rest of the way to where it needs to be! Then I learned that they charge money.    But I suppose they have to.

Anyway I've poked around looking at various mentors, and have found few that have experience writing in my areas of interest, which I think is critical for the type of input I seek. I have local nonfiction mentors who don't write in my subgenre, who are available for a relatively modest $25/hour. I finally found one who may be just what I'm looking for, but she charges $90/hour. Yikes!

I'm curious what other's opinions are on the value (or lack thereof) of mentors and how to get the most bag for the buck.
The type of input I'm looking for is "You are ready to be published in this field...go now, and submit!" or "This is what you need to do in order to get published regularly in this subgenre". I don't think someone unfamiliar with the genre will be able to do that, but I also don't have many hundreds of dollars laying around and wonder if anyone is worth nearly $100/hour.

[Chet]

I think of mentors as friends, people I personally know.

Do you have other writing friends that you meet with and chat about writing? If there are older (as in more experienced, maybe even published) writers among them, maybe you can ask if they'll mentor you.

Another alternative would be to get into a writing group. While this might not give you the mentors you're looking for, at least you will have other people to swap writing, exchange ideas, critique one another's work. For some, this works. There is the added pleasure of seeing one another grow as writers, and giving encouragement as well as a shoulder to cry on when someone receives a rejection slip. And then, of course, when someone's manuscript gets accepted ... WOW!

People who charge for mentoring - hmm, sounds like another name for book doctors.

[Patrick]

I first encountered the mentor thing when I started thinking how great it would be to have one of my favorite writers as a mentor. In a short amount of time, they could probably tell me how far I am from the goal line. So I started googling writing/writers/mentors and found its actually a pretty common thing. My local writers group has several mentors. Many literary centers (OK at least several) advertise mentors on their websites. Many writers (OK at least several) advertise availability as mentors on their personal website. And they all charge for it. And I suppose they have to, because any respected writer who didn't charge for it would soon be swamped with requests.

I have had non-writing friends review my writing, and that has been helpful but it can only go so far. I have considered writing groups but haven't found one that is really pertinent to my interests. There are no nonfiction writing groups within 2 hours. I'm not sure I would go even if there were, I'm not really looking for a support group. I have a lot of confidence in my writing. I really want feedback from someone with a proven track record. I just don't know if it's worth $90/hour.

What I probably need is to just submit and let the editors review my work now....I'm just thinking about last minute ways to procrastinate and make sure I'm ready for the big leagues, or minor leagues. But the editors will let me know, I'm sure. 

[Gene Wilburn]

Patrick,

You may have explored this already, but there are some colleges and universities that offer creative writing (including nonfiction) as an online course, with an individual instructor who "mentors" your work. It would take a bit of work, but if you explored some of these, and corresponded with the person teaching the course, you might find a good fit.

Gene

[Steve Brannon]

Patrick,

Take a look at the list of Writers Conferences, Colonies, and Workshops on the Poets & Writers web site:

http://www.pw.org/content/writers_conferences_colonies_and_workshops

You might also look at Preditors & Editors web site, which lists running writer-related scams:

http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/

See their Warnings area:
http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/pubwarn.htm

# # #

I think Gene's advice is the best course to keep you from wasting money.

Best of luck.

Steve

[elissa_malcohn]

Ditto to Chet, Gene, and Steve.

I also advocate reading for craft.  Read authors and works you admire, but study their work as you read.  Why do you like that particular writing?  If you like how they tell a story, then diagram the story.  In what order do they present their facts?  How do they make those facts engaging?

For example, I love the nonfiction of John McPhee.  Here's how I deconstructed one of his passages (used in a handout in a workshop I gave on metaphor):


"...Dominy had taken Brower and me, some days earlier, down into the interior of his indisputable masterpiece, the ten-million-ton plug in Glen Canyon.  We had seen it first from the air and then from the rim of Glen Canyon, and the dam had appeared from on high to be frail and surprisingly small, a gracefully curving wafer wedged flippantly into the river gorge, with a boulevard of blue water on one side of it and a trail of green river on the other."
-- John McPhee, Encounters With the Archdruid

"Masterpiece" is defined by the Random House College Dictionary as, "A person's most excellent production, as in an art."  One thinks of a painting or a piece of sculpture or a symphony, rather than an industrial monolith of concrete and steel.  "Masterpiece" connotes a certain refinement.

McPhee follows up this suggestive word with the phrase, "ten-million-ton plug."

The dictionary defines "plug" as, "A piece of wood or other material used to stop up a hole or aperture, to fill a gap, or to act as a wedge."  Other definitions refer to a "cake of pressed tobacco" and "a worn-out or inferior horse."

Hardly refined.  Hardly a "masterpiece" in the classical definition, yet McPhee melds these two disparate pictures in his use of metaphoric vocabulary.

Then he describes the dam from the air, where it is "frail and surprisingly small," no longer the "ten-million-ton plug" it had been in the preceding sentence.  As if that weren't enough, the dam is wedged "flippantly" into the river gorge.  A single word turns a "gracefully curving wafer" -- shades of refinement here, linking back to "masterpiece" -- into an afterthought subject to careless handling.

By using the words "boulevard" and "trail," McPhee connotes roads -- using metaphoric language in the context of water bodies -- and further underscores contrasts.  A boulevard is a broad avenue, a major thoroughfare, while a trail is narrow and unpaved.

------------------
Warning: Reading for craft brings with it certain recreational hazards.  I no longer breeze through books the way I used to.  I often find I read for craft whether I want to or not, so I get stopped in my tracks much more often.

[Patrick]

Thanks Elissa, we have similar tastes in writers I think! I will have to think about craft reading...I think I already have been, in a way. I have been deliberately avoiding a close reading of my favorite writer lately, the one who is my chief inspiration, because I'm afraid I already write too much like him without even trying.  Its probably just wishful thinking though...

Thanks for the links and warnings Steve. I know it sounds odd ( it did to me to when I first read about it), but the mentors I've looked at are definitely legitimate. They may not be worth what they charge, but they are not scammers.

I have thought about taking a creative nonfiction course for years but I always run into doubts about their worth. After looking at a bunch of options I had pretty much decided to take a correspondence class in creative nonfiction through my alma mater.  I emailed the teacher and asked a couple questions about her class, and she replied to me in all lower case, horrible (no, appalling) use of syntax and grammar, and she did not even use capitalize her name. I decided she wasn't getting $500 from me.  I should probably consider taking a class somewhere else though, but  that was the most attractive one I found.  

Most that I've looked at seem to be of the "memoir" writing type. If I could find one of the "John McPhee" or "Barry Lopez" type, I would definitely take it.

That might be a good topic for it's own thread, "creative nonfiction classes".  

[Steve Brannon]

Patrick,

You might be interested in these programs:

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/mentor/mentor.htm


Steve

[PeteW]

This thread brought to mind part of the autobiography I have been writing, on and off, for some years. Towards the end of 1940 my school on the south east coast of Kent was closed because of the threat of invasion. I went to a school in Oxfordshire where the English Language tutor, a man named Evans, introduced the term's lectures by saying he hoped we would find the English language interesting.

Here's the extract:

"His method of teaching could hardly have failed to make it interesting. Later, when I returned to Woodford House, we had to learn grammar the hard way by parsing sentences into tables of clauses and sub-clauses and learn all the various parts of speech and cases off by heart. Evans hated this type of learn-by-heart teaching. He told us that ordinary people made the language. Grammarians, mostly Victorians, had categorised it for analysis. He taught the various parts of speech as they cropped up during lectures, and was very keen on good syntax which, he said, could over-rule some pedantic points of grammar if the better syntax and word flow made the meaning more clear and eliminated ambiguity. He also said that, in general, he preferred words derived from Anglo-Saxon or Middle English to their 19th century replacements derived from Latin.
    
He often reminded us that the purpose of a language was clear and unambiguous communication, and said he would cheerfully end a sentence with a preposition, start one with a conjunction or split an infinitive if it made the meaning more clear, the flow of the sentence less clumsy or added necessary emphasis. He also paid a lot of attention to what he called the euphony of a sentence and to the word order which could bring out different shades of meaning or paint a more effective picture. This, he said, gave English a tremendous advantage over some other languages where the word order was rigidly laid down. He also warned us about over-using adjectives and similies. Similies, he said, were a resort  often used by people who lacked the power of description.
    
He often used poems as examples. One was by J. C. Squire describing an old Regency country house that had fallen into disrepair. It was said to have been owned by an old retired colonel, long since dead. It started:
    
     The old yellow stucco
     of the time of the Regent
     is flaking and peeling.
     The rows of square windows
     in the straight yellow building
     are empty and still.
Later came:
     And there's grass in his gateway,
     grass on his footpath,
     grass on his doorstep.
     The garden's grown over,
     the well-chain is broken,
     the windows are bare.

     Evans picked out the line "of the time of the Regent". He pointed out how much more effective was "of the time of the Regent" with its repeated 'of the' than something like "of Regency times" even though that would scan. He also pointed out the economy of words in “The rows of square windows in the straight yellow building are empty and still”. This one phrase, he said, described perfectly a gaunt Regency house, and together with the first three lines drew a perfect picture of an old house, once grand, that had fallen into disrepair. He drew our attention to the repeated use of the word grass in “And there’s grass in his gateway, grass on his footpath, grass on his doorstep.” Something the meticulous old Colonel would never have tolerated. “The garden’s grown over, the well chain is broken,” and a return to the empty, still windows in “the windows are bare”.

In just the few lines quoted here from a longer poem, Evans pointed out that Squire had driven home an unforgettable picture of a once grand home that was now neglected and uncared for. The "time of the Regent, 1812 to 1820, was more than a hundred years before I was born, yet for me, the whole poem, without mentioning it, carried a vaguely disturbing feeling of nostalgia with the tinge of sadness or bitter-sweetness that nostalgia often carries.

I'm sometimes accused, probably justifiably, of being over-critical of some modern English usage, but I was at the impressionable age of 13, and Evans' lectures gave me a love of the English language that has lasted ever since."

PeteW

[Gene Wilburn]

Two used books arrived in the mail: The John McFee Reader and The Second John McFee Reader.

I'm not familiar with his writing and I thought these would be a good entree. I've started the first piece in book one and can already see why he's so well liked as a writer. I'm looking forward to some good reading and I suspect a lot of inspiration.

Gene