Can a mentor help improve your creative writing?

There are lots of aspiring writers who call upon the services of mentors to help them write creatively to the best of their ability. In addition, there are a number of successful, professional writers who use writing mentors to help keep them focused as they write, and to help them find creative inspiration in their writing ideas, or to support the editorial elements of their work. There is therefore a strong market for writing mentors, and certainly a writing mentor can bring a lot to your writing, regardless of how experienced a writer you may be.

Many individuals are confused as to what it is a mentor does – particularly when it comes to supporting creative writing. Listed below are ways in which a mentor can help a writer, no matter what stage they may be at within their writing career:

  1. Provide a sounding board for your ideas. When you write, you often get lost in your own word of ideas, characters, plot lines and epiphanies. This is a great place to live, and you need to be fully involved with your storyline and the characters that reside within your story to ensure that you write language at its very best. However, being so closely connected with your story’s plotline and characters can mean that you are unable to truly judge just how well some of your planned ideas will work. A mentor can help here. As an impartial participant in your story or book’s creation, a mentor can be someone that you bounce ideas off of, and who can perhaps suggest alternative ideas when your original plotlines don’t seem to flow as well as you may have first thought.
  2. Help you create a structure. Often writers will go off and start writing without having really given any major thought to how their work will be structured. There is definitely a ‘for’ and against’ argument that revolves around the need to plan a story or book. However most writers would now concede that to write well, you really do need to decide on some form of book and chapter structure before you set about writing.
  3. Provide editorial support. A writing mentor can read through drafts of your writing and suggest ways in which these drafts could be improved – both in terms of general proofreading assessments and in terms of structure, characterisation, voice, style, storyline and flow.
  4. Keep you motivated! Self motivation is hard to sustain. By having another person there to champion your writing, you’ll find that your enthusiasm for your work will be heightened and so it’ll be easier to motivate yourself to write.