đ Get Yourself an Imaginary Mentor (or Ten)
Surprise! Your mentors don't have to know they're your mentors. Or even be sentient.
How often have we been asked a variation of the question, âIf you could invite any <insert number> people, living or dead, to dinner for one night, who would you choose and why?â
Itâs a tantalizing question because, of course, we so rarely get direct access to the people that inspire us.
In the last few years, I have been incredibly fortunate to mentor with both author Jessica Young and author-illustrator Vikram Madan. I cannot begin to describe how much I learned from both of those writersâand how I continue to reflect on those lessons as I scribble-scrabble my way forward!
âŠHowever, this post is not about that.
Instead, today I want to talk about my chorus of imaginary mentors. Why are they imaginary? Well, some have passed. Others are, awkwardly enough, fictional characters. And a few, I dunno, maybe they are just too busy being AWESOME.
In short, there is a smorgasbord of reasons a mentor may be unavailable to you IRL.
But, donât let that deter you.
âAre my stories true, you ask? No, they are imaginary tales ⊠But real life is only one kind of life â there is also the life of the imagination,â E. B. White once said.
Fitting, then, that Andy (as his friends called E. B.) has joined my built-up-over-time imaginary mentor roster. (In my head, Andy sounds like Chris Martin from Coldplay because they look somewhat alike, outside of the eyebrow situation. Blasphemy, perhaps, but the brain wants what it wants.)
So why do I think an imaginary coterie is the beesâ knees?
âWhy? For what? To what end?â I hear you saying in a plaintive voice not unlike Titus Burgessâ. (Again, my brain=my prerogative.)
There are many great reasons to have a mentor, but some of the best parts are having someone to turn to for feedback and advice, and to help you define and reach your goals. An imaginary mentor is no different in my mind (ha! See what I did there?).
Me: I need to wrap up this scene in my MG novel, but I just canât figure it out. Any thoughts, Urs?
Imaginary Ursula: Sometimes finishing means setting it in the fireplace..âŠ*
Me: VERY helpful. đ
(Having said that, sometimes it is just better to throw something, well, at least aside. So itâs still a useful thought exercise.)
*Iâm still sad about the loss of her MG follow-up novel, which she burnt.
But outside of internal imaginary conversationsâwhich, letâs face it, arenât usually applauded by polite societyâhow do you âworkâ with an imaginary mentor?
Andy, Ursula, Amy, and Others That Shall Not be Named (and I) are so glad you asked.
You can (and should!) learn from your mentors byâŠ
Studying their books and their art.
Reading their blog, interviews, and biography (if available).
Thinking deeply about what it is about them that draws your interest, and then draw parallels with your (perhaps latent!) desires and ambitions. It may turn out that there is one specific aspect of this mentorâperhaps their wordplay, for exampleâthat you really want to learn from.
Finding out who THEY were inspired by! For example, E. B. White was inspired by his wife, Katherine, who was fiction editor (and a regular childrenâs literature reviewer) at The New Yorker, his own observations of a spider with her egg sac, and a 1920s newspaper columnist named Don Marquis, among others.
Once you feel like you have a bit of a handle (in whatever way) on the creator in question, it becomes easier to imagine what they might do in a given situationânot that you should do that thing as they would! Instead, the imagining is simply shorthand to coax new ideas or perspectives to solve your own creative problems in your own preferred way.
For example, if I canât figure out why a line is working, Andy might remind me that simple, orderly, sincere language is best, and Amy (Krouse-Rosenthal) might remind me that simple but playful is even lovelier.
In short, if you can get yourself a living, breathing mentorâthatâs the absolute best. DO IT.
But, alsoâthatâs not the be-all, end-all.
Yours in guiding spirit,
Elayne
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This was some great insight! I never really thought about mentors in this way and I like it.