Lois Donovan

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart…Come to it anyway but lightly. You must not come lightly to the blank page.” Stephen King

Mentoring a new writer is exciting on several levels. There is the anticipation of guiding a new writer around some of those pitfalls that often plague beginners and the joy of helping to make someone’s dream come true. It is challenging on a different level from writing your own work for the very reason that it is not your story and the point is not to make it your story. It’s a dance of learning when to lead and when to follow.

Every writer is unique, as is every project and everyone is at a different place along their writing path. What works for one writer, may not work for another and sessions need to be individually tailored. That said, there are many tools and techniques that I wish I had in my very empty toolbox when I began to write my first novel. Having these tools and understanding some of the pitfalls prior to beginning my daunting project, would have made the going a lot smoother and a lot quicker. It is my hope to provide such help and insight to new writers.

Below I have shared some ideas from a sample mentoring session. It is my hope you will find a helpful tip for your own writing path.

Fly on the Wall

Each session begins with a free-writing activity I call Mindless Musings. (Click on the link and scroll to the last activity.) We both write for ten minutes on any topic, changing topics whenever we feel like it. The only rules are: 1. the writing is with pen and paper, not a device, and 2. no stopping until the time is up. It’s an excellent warm-up for the work ahead.

Something a lot of new writers do is forget to put everything on the page. Sometimes in the effort to develop the characters and puzzle out the plot, writers forget that the reader is not as familiar with the whole story and backstory. In a picture book or a graphic novel, the illustrations tell some of the story, but in a novel, words must create the picture. Have you ever wondered how your favourite authors make you feel as though you are right there in the midst of the action, or how the characters feel so real and relatable, you immediately identify with the crisis they face? The answer is in the detail. If the author skimps on the sensory detail, the scene is vague and the reader will not be drawn in. The scene and the characters feel flat.

The sensory walk activity is a great activity for providing helpful collections of words in the Writer’s Notebook. The act of going on a sensory walk from time to time helps focus the senses and makes us more aware of our surroundings on a daily basis. Curiosity and awareness of detail are excellent traits for a fiction writer to hone.

Sensory Walk

Before leaving on our walk, we create a place in the Writers’ Notebook to collect information we gather. There needs to be space for words/phrases organized by the five senses. I like to add a sixth spot for mood/atmosphere/feeling. The walk can be anywhere. Depending on the weather, it can take place inside a buidling or outside. We did both, with the added advantage of a cafe inside the library. It is amazing how many sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures to touch, there are when you actually stop to record everything.

Sometimes the lack of detail in a story, is because the writer needs to learn more about the character or about the situation. Writers need to become familiar with the main characters and their backstories. The backstory is what happened to the character prior to the start of the novel. The deeper we know our characters, the more real they become and the more they will inform the writer about their actions and the more multi-dimensional they will appear on the page.

Character Development

Write a journal entry from the point of view of your main character. What is happening on this particular day and how is the MC feeling? This scene does not need to appear in the story. Try writing a journal entry from the POV of your main character every day for a week. You’ll be amazed at how much you learn about them.

For an interesting twist, have the main character visit your world on this particular day. Will the MC visit a school, a library, a mall? What does the MC think about your neighbourhood compared to their own? Using words from your senses collection, describe what the MC experiences as well as their reaction to this different world. How does the MC respond in an unfamiliar setting?

Writing a story is much like building a house — you can have all the right ideas, materials, and tools, but if your foundation isn’t solid, not even the most beautiful structure will stand.

Jerry Jenkins

The genre the new writer and I are working on is fantasy, however, the story primarily takes place in the human world. With no scenes in the fantasy world, it was hard to relate to it or understand its importance to the story. The following activity was to develop the fantasy world and make it a real place.

Write a scene in which your main character accidentally goes through the portal to Z ( fantasy world.) What does she experience upon arriving? Use all of the senses to paint this unique world, transporting your readers into it with your main character. Allow readers to see, hear, taste, touch smell, experience the vivid surroundings. Something is happening. There is unrest! What is the cause? Has the MC somehow disrupted the world? Who are the inhabitants? What are their key characteristics? What is your MC’s first impression of the inhabitants?

This kind of activity adds depth to the existing characters and provides important detail about the fantasy world. Not everything you write needs to find its way into your story. Writing random practice scenes can help with showing instead of telling and it takes off the pressure worrying about how it will fit into the story. In this particular instance, the writer decided to fit the scene into her story because she was pleased with the scene after she had written it.

Start at the End

Writing is a very messy, business. Writing a full-length novel is messy and daunting. According to this blog I stumbled across, only 3% of writers who set out to write a novel, actually finish. Quora lists the finishers as less than 1%. I’m not sure anyone really knows the actual stats on this but what is apparent is that many, many would-be authors do not finish their goal of writing a novel.

When I began to mentor the new writer, she had several chapters of a first draft. Rather than trying to continue on from this point, I decided it would be more beneficial to jump to the ending. It wasn’t immediately clear to me where the story was headed and so I wanted to know about the writer’s ideas for the rest of the story. The main character is a teen detective so solving the mystery in the story is an obvious part of the ending. The fantasy story subplot is tied closely to the main mystery plot, so there are a lot of threads both to keep track of and to tie up at the end. Sometimes it’s easier to imagine the ending and work backwards so that you have a specific destination you’re aiming for. Otherwise, a lot of meandering and side trips can take the story in too many directions many of which are not helpful. The action must always move the story forward. Ironically, going backwards is sometimes the easiest way to achieve this.

THANK YOU for joining our mentoring session today. I hope you found one or two of the ideas helpful.

HAPPY WRITING!