Author Mary DeMuth recently wrote a guest post for Michael Hyatt’s blog titled What it Takes to Become a Master Writer. This is related to mentoring, so I thought it would be good to place the link here for people reading this blog. Go read the post and then come back her to read my take on the subject, as it relates to mentoring.
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First, let’s consider the 10,000 hours. How many hours have you practiced writing? Unlike with the mastery of a musical instrument, it’s hard to guess. I’m a pianist and I know how much time I spend sitting at the piano each week. I can average that out, multiply it by the number of years I’ve been playing and it will give me a rough idea of how much I’ve practiced, but with writing, we must count many things that include things like the time we’ve spent typing out stories, the time we spent on English homework, even the time we’ve spent daydreaming about a story we will write. All of that is required for a writer.
Mary states:
Those who write novels ask me how to deepen characterization, or create a character out of a setting, or evoke mood, or widen suspense. I usually can’t answer that. Why? Because most of what I write now is instinctive, born from years of experimentation and failure.
Consider those words for a moment. What does that mean to us in terms of mentoring? What good is a mentor that can’t tell us what we want to know? The moral to this story is that those people we might think are the ideal mentors may not be. Our natural tendency may be to seek out the most highly recognizable author in the industry, the guy with ten bestsellers to his name and multiple houses, all paid for by his writing. But though he may be able to write very well, he may not be able to explain how he did it. A better mentor is someone who isn’t that far along the path. If we want to know how to do the things Mary mentioned, we shouldn’t seek out Mary as a mentor, since she has told us she doesn’t know how to tell us those things. Instead, we should seek out an author who has less experience overall, but who has recently developed the skills we need. Such an author will be able to tell us what he did to learn that skill, what mistakes he made, etc. After we have learned that skill, it might then be time to seek out a more experienced author, like Mary, who may not be able to explain that kind of stuff, but can explain the skills she has recently developed.
Teaching and mentoring as also skills that improve with practice. While we imagine that we will always be able to explain to mentees what we have learned, if we don’t do this on a regular basis, we will forget how to explain the things we have learned to do instinctively and we will be in the same boat that Mary has found herself in.
