Working with a Writing Mentor, Part 5: Dances with Mentors

-->
-->

You can dance by yourself, and that can be creative and fun, but it’s much more fun to dance with someone else. Why? Because the pooled energy of two people working out a dance together is much more than the sum of the parts. You find yourself inventing steps you didn’t realize you could do. You have cartridges of adrenaline you didn’t know existed.

It’s similar when you’re working with a creative writing mentor. The concentrated energy of having a person focused on your work for a sustained period of time produces results you would have a hard time achieving all on your own. Just knowing that someone who is knowledgeable about the field of literature is waiting for your new work is an enormous incentive to do your best and even to exceed your own expectations for yourself. That kind of directed concentration on all the details of your work is a rare opportunity.

Use that energy you get from your mentor’s attention and interest in your work to produce both more and better work than you’ve done previously. 

That doesn’t mean at all that you have to imitate your mentor’s dance steps. You have your own dance as a writer, and that’s what you’re developing. Your dance may in some ways mirror the steps of your mentor’s work, or the concerns of your mentor’s work, but it also needs to be your own, or you risk stepping on your mentor’s toes. 

In what ways does your work have to be your own? In the same way that your childhood is your own, or your ancestry is your own, or your family history, or your cultural and religious heritage, or your circle of friends, or your values. You have so much that is your own to draw on, there is no need to imitate anything about your mentor’s work.

Your mentor can also step on your toes in this dance. A mentor can overstep his or her authority, making comments that are too personal or too much in the vein of asking you to write the way he or she does. But if that happens, that’s your mentor’s problem.

Your job is to explore your own project as a writer as deeply as possible, even more deeply than you thought possible. Your job is to polish your work as thoroughly as possible, even more thoroughly than you thought you were capable of. That’s where that attention from your mentor gives you energy you didn't know you had.

Eventually, you need to move on to dancing solo, to filling the stage on your own. But even when you’re dancing solo, your mentor is still in your mind sitting front row center, watching every step, and the first to lead the applause for you if you’re dancing the way you know you can.

Later on, you can also regain some of that dancing energy by collaborating with other artists, creating texts that can be acted, illustrated, sung—or even danced.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 , Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Working with a Writing Mentor, Part 3: When Should You Trust Your Mentor?

-->

The one person whose advice you should listen to absolutely without question is your mentor. Now, just by coincidence, I happen to be a mentor. Mentor is a word that comes from ancient Greek and means someone who has made endless mistakes over an entire lifetime. I’m joking, but it is true that over the course of decades in the arts, a mentor has made almost every possible error that a writer can make.

The reason this is good news for you, is that your mentor can perhaps prevent you from repeating some of those mistakes yourself.

In reality, the goddess Minerva in Homer’s Odyssey took the form of the character named Mentor to guide Telemachus in how to deal with those pesky suitors, who were hitting on his mom, Penelope.

Sometimes you don’t understand why your mentor is recommending certain changes in your work. Feel free to ask if you don’t see why your mentor is suggesting something. But at some point, if you are a creative writing student or a new writer, you sometimes have to take it on faith that your mentor is guiding you in the right direction. As the words of the spiritual go, We will understand it better, by and by.

That isn’t to say that you should follow your mentor without question. You should be particularly attentive to your mentor’s blind spots, and the places where your mentor’s aesthetic may not coincide with our own. Your mentor could be from an older generation. Things that make sense to your generation might seem odd to your mentor. Your mentor may be of a different background in terms of class, race, gender, sexuality, etc., and that might create areas of aesthetic disconnect.

That doesn’t mean your mentor’s advice is wrong, but it might mean that you have an area where your taste does not overlap. In those areas, just politely agree to disagree with your mentor’s opinions. But make sure you’re not doing that out of laziness about questioning your own assumptions or naiveté. 


Other recent posts about writing topics:
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

Working with a Writing Mentor, Part 1: Trusting the Advice

In the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to be a novice writer again when I tried to go outside my main genre of poetry to write plays. Since almost all of my earlier work was poetry, my first attempt at a play was basically a series of dramatic monologues, loosely stitched together. Luckily I had a very experienced mentor to help me in my first efforts as a playwright: the late Barbara Oliver, founder of the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California; a veteran producer, director, and actor who brought many new plays to fruition. Barbara actually said to me after reading my first play, “You have to have the actors talk to each other when they’re on stage,” which gives you an idea of how unfinished that script was. Several years later, when I wrote my third play, Things I Didn't Know I Loved, based on the life and poetry of the Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet, Barbara Oliver read and critiqued many, many drafts of it.

Barbara provided me with numerous valuable suggestions on each version, telling me not to get too caught up in the research I had done, and dig for the drama in each scene. There was one scene in particular that Barbara objected to, but I wouldn’t let go of it. She quoted for me a comment she had heard the playwright David Mamet make, "Writing a play is like building an airplane. You have to get rid of everything that impedes the thrust." Think how streamlined a jet is. 
So Barbara convinced me to take out an entire scene that I was very attached to, a scene that involved Nazim’s relationship with the Turkish head of state, Ataturk, whom he had a complex admiration for and conflict with. But that scene didn’t move ahead the story of Nazim Hikmet’s life enough to merit its inclusion in the play. Working on my own, I would never have cut that scene, but at a certain point, I realized that Barbara just knew more than I did. She had decades of experience producing plays, some productions that had worked, some that had flopped, and she just knew. So I took her word for it and cut the scene. At times, you just have to go on faith and trust your mentor. I'll talk more about the mentoring relationship in my next few blogs.


Other recent posts about writing topics:
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4  
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;  Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka