Ras: Why Writers Need Mentors

When John Casey was in law school at Harvard, he took a course in creative writing from the short story writer Peter Taylor and submitted a draft of a novel he’d written in the summer. After looking it over, Taylor suggested at their first one-on-one conference that Casey write some short stories. Casey wrote two stories in a month of weekend writing and gave them to Taylor. At their second conference Taylor told Casey: “Don’t be a lawyer. You’re a writer.”

This anecdote is lifted from a delightful book I’m reading titled Mentors, Muses and Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, conceived and edited by the novelist Elizabeth Benedict. These essays are about the transitional moment when young writers, in Benedict’s words, “uncertain of their identities and what they were capable of” found a beacon and “their wobbly lives changed direction and velocity.” Read a few of these essays and you get a good sense of why mentors are so crucial in the writing business.

The original Mentor was a character in The Odyssey, an old friend and adviser of Odysseus. When Odysseus headed out for the Trojan Wars – a 20-year-plus project – he entrusted Mentor with the care and education of his son Telemachus. Today mentors are hot. Just about every high school student, entrepreneur, grad student, and young executive is on the make for a good mentor. But what, specifically, do mentors do for young writers?

Based on Mentors, Muses and Monsters, I’d say at least three big things:

Validation
A mentor looks at a minor leaguer’s efforts to put words together and blesses these. Your talent passes muster, says a person who knows what it takes. At a time in life when most writers are plagued with self-doubt this can have a monumental impact.

Alice Munro

Here’s Cheryl Strayed telling what a letter from Alice Munro meant to her. (Munro had responded to a story of hers by writing back and saying, “It’s a wonderful, unexpected story and I wouldn’t change a hair on its head.”)

“A shaky, sickening glee washed through me and then drained away almost immediately replaced by a daffy disbelief: Alice Munro had written to me Alice Munro! Those two words were a kind of Holy Grail to me then: the lilting rise and fall of Alice, the double-barreled thunk of Munro. Together they seemed less like a name than an object I could hold in my hands – a stoneware bowl, perhaps, or a pewter plate, equal parts generous and unforgiving. They bore the weight of everything I loved, admired, and understood about the art and craft of fiction, everything I ached to master myself.”

A Challenge
Mentors don’t make it easy for their protégés. While recognizing their talent and special qualities, mentors push their acolytes into new territory.

Jim Shepard writes about the eloquent sighs of his writing teacher, the novelist John Hawkes:

“He sighed a lot when fiction didn’t excite him. He’d sigh and begin to praise the story in minor ways, and my heart would sink right through the floor. He’d walk me through the story – this was fine, that was fine, this was certainly a well-turned phrase he supposed – but nothing would get him excited until he finally ran across something bizarre, something unexpected.”

Reminiscing about Elizabeth Hardwick, her professor at Columbia, Elizabeth Benedict captures the two-edged face of the mentor. Benedict mentioned to Hardwick that another professor had encouraged her to be writer and asked if she agreed. Hardwick’s response: “I think you can do the work, but you have to decide if want such a hard life.”

This is a vital question that takes many forms. How serious are you about your writing? Do you have the endurance? Do want to be a writer or do you want to write? Do you want it enough to live a hard life? You’re the only one who can answer these questions, and mentors do well to pose them early in the game.

Oracular Advice
Mentors frequently advise their proteges, but rarely in the form of seven writing tips. The pronouncements are usually far more interesting than that, rather like the prophecies of the sibyls at Delphi, presumably straight from the gods, but not at all easy to interpret.

Gordon Lish

Lily Tuck has an essay on what it’s like take a writing course from the renowned wizard of fiction Gordon Lish. Lish holds forth in these six-hour sessions with a phalanx of apercus and accumulated wisdom along these lines:

“Writing is a way of behaving and we must learn to behave importantly.


“A writer must have authority. The effect of authority is created by many means but none more crucial than the appearance of conviction. Your speech issues from your heart because you have no choice. Authority is not just possessing what you speak of but being possessed by it.


“The writer is there to celebrate human mystery. He does not have an agenda. You must come to the page without pettiness, without holding a grudge.


“Great works are achieved out of excess, out of imbalance, out of madness.”

And so on. This is pretty inspirational stuff for me, but translating it into the mundane practice of story-making is another matter.

Peter Taylor

In a less abstract vein, when Casey once “moaned a bit” about writer’s block to Peter Taylor, Taylor told about a small farmhouse he’d bought and how he liked to go there and sit and gaze at the view. “But the best thing,” Taylor said, “is that nobody sees me, nobody hears me, nobody knows what I’m doing. After a time, who knows how long, I’ll go home and write in the basement.”

That’s the voice of the oracle again. He doesn’t tell you what to do; he tells you a story instead. And that is one of the great virtues of this book. The 30 writers, some famous like Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Cunningham, and Jane Smiley, and others less well known, are all first-rate storytellers, and it is the stories they tell and the marvelous portraits they draw of their mentors that will stick with you.

There are many nuggets of the writing life gathered in this book, but five years down the road I‘ll probably remember best Carolyn See’s portrait of her father – a man of wit and imagination and fine literary taste who worked mostly as a small-time salesman but, out of work at age 69, bloomed suddenly as a writer and cranked out 73 top-selling porn novels in his remaining years.