Mentoring

Is mentoring a good idea?

MENTOR MATTER

Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to have competent and willing people who mentored me. In my marketing and sales positions, I worked my way up from the shipping department to riding in helicopters and private jets due to someone looking after me and having faith that I could do the job. Now that I am a writer, I still seek and get excellent mentors. I have 10 people that I trust and give them a copy of my manuscript to review and provide me with comments that always make improvements to my writing. So I have learned that mentors are important and they make a huge difference in your ability to reach and touch your dreams.

I am very lucky to have my wife as a live in mentor. Pat has contributed so much input to my writing. She has a knack of coming up with just the right suggestions to make the ending of my novels interesting and exciting making the reader wanting to come back for more.

But do you want or need a mentor? Here are my thoughts - Mentors come in different forms – a friend, sibling, teacher, parent, clergy, drill instructor, boss, and so on… The mentor guides an inexperienced person by building confidence and molding positive performance. A successful mentor understands that his or her task is to be reliable, engaged, genuine, and aware of the needs of the person they mentor.

A bit of history of the word Mentor - The word mentor comes from the character "Mentor" in Homer's epic tale, The Odyssey. Mentor was a trusted friend of Odysseus, the king of Ithaca. When Odysseus fought in the Trojan War, Mentor served as friend and counsel to Odysseus' son Telemachus. Riverside Webster’s II New College Dictionary 1995 defines a mentor as “a wise and trusted teacher or counselor.” The act of mentoring is a series of ongoing and little successes. You will be able to make a real impact through consistent and ongoing relationship building.

First, you need to decide what you want help on. Review your writing critical eye, decide where you are deficient, define the areas where you need to sharpen your skills, and outline the specific writing goals you want to achieve.

Moreover, by specific I mean very specific.

Is your problem grammar, characters, plotting, sentence construction, or style? Maybe motivation or finding the time to write is an issue. A good mentor can help in many of these areas - as long as they know what you need.

A mentor must be self-assured they can aid you in achieving your writing goal. When you start seeking out mentors, ask questions. Not only is it important you know what you want, it is important you are confident the mentor can and will deliver for you.

All authors are different, so are mentors. Mentors may not be best selling authors or have a string of writing credits. Some mentors are simply good at what they do. What should you look for in a mentor - Intelligence, patience, professionalism - Yes, all of these things? Failing that, you could contact a famous - or favorite - author and ask if they ever mentor new authors. Most do not but a few will.

What is the cost? Again, it depends on what you want. Do you need an overall assessment and minor guidance – then you are looking at something in the range of $300 to $500 for a 100,000-word novel. I have read that the cost is this cost is quickly becoming an industry standard.

Want to give your book and attitude a thorough workout (editing, reworking etc?) Budget up to $1500 a novel. Pay less and you have to wonder what you are getting. (You get what you pay for etc.)

Need complete hand holding or lots of encouragement and blow-by-blow help. Most reputable mentors will charge from $500 to $1000 a month for that type of aid. They are usually open to negotiation depending on your circumstances. A few mentors will charge more - much more.

But, remember, mentoring is not always in relation to the writing style or technique. Sometimes it is about turning you into a writer. Gaining the right mentality and putting you on the road of self-discovery, with the confidence and skills to handle success in this industry.

Whatever you get from it - it should be rewarding and fun. Shop around to find a mentor that suits you, makes you feel good about yourself, and helps you grow - as a person and an author.

Travel and writing ... A good mix

TRAVEL AND WRITING - A GOOD MIX.

St. Thomas

Scottish Highlands

Ireland

Travel is an integral part of my writing routine. Being able to relate to physical locations I use in my writing adds a nice in-depth touch to my tales. My travel not only helps to flesh out settings and locales, it allows me to experience first hand many of the exciting scenes and action I write into my novels.

This spring I traveled to Ireland, and then in the summer to the Maryland coast. During my frequent treks, out and about, I take copious handwritten notes and spend time people watching. I enjoy writing the various descriptions’ I sketch out from the people I observe. It is fair to say that most of the character features I create in a story are likely to be fashioned after real people. The example below happened at a small outdoor café on the Ocean City boardwalk.

Brief Example – Short cropped dull blonde hair framed a face that had no fear of repeated and long exposure to the sun. Her light blue eyes shined from within as they offered a stark contrast to her tan skin. The sun bleached blonde boy with her is her grandson. He was still wet from his morning spent in the ocean surf with his boogie board. They sat eating ice cream at a table with a red umbrella that struggled against the wind to stay put. She and the boy raced with the heat to eat it before it melted into a goopy sugary mess.

By doing on site research for my novels, I have had a chance to do things that I never considered doing. For my first novel “Cure Complex,” I toured the space shuttle simulator in Houston, TX along with a mockup of the space station. In addition to reviewing hardware, I had the opportunity to view and handle moon rocks in a lunar receiving lab. In California, I went aboard a U.S. Sub and a Russian Sub and an Underwater Explorer Sub. In Florida, I toured launch pad 39A that had the Saturn rocket on the pad prepped the launch of the Apollo Soyuz mission. Pursuing my quest to be authentic, I had the honor of attending a garden party at the White House, took part in placing a patch on the AID’s quilt display at the National Mall, toured Air Force One, and worked the controls of a DC-10 refueling tanker.

My travels have included the following areas - Every State in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Central America, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Ireland, England, and Scotland. Activities I have done along the way… Touring castles, riding trains, touring natural hot springs, having a Guinness in Dublin to seeing a glacier calving in the Yukon, sailing on Loch Ness looking for the monster I hope my readers enjoy the effort I put into my novels in order to give them an impression of being there in each scene.

My new novel – “Flesh, Bone, Clone,” will be available by the end of 2014.

I hope that my writing blog posts will give my readers creative ideas on how to develop strategies for writing great books. Let me know what you do to create stories and scenes from your travel experiences.

Flesh, Bone, Clone - a new novel by Ed Murphy

Important words...

The editors of the American Heritage^® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.

"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."

The following is the entire list of 100 words:

abjure abrogate abstemious acumen antebellum auspicious belie bellicose bowdlerize chicanery chromosome churlish circumlocution circumnavigate deciduous deleterious diffident enervate enfranchise epiphany equinox euro evanescent expurgate facetious fatuous feckless fiduciary filibuster gamete gauche gerrymander hegemony hemoglobin homogeneous hubris hypotenuse impeach incognito incontrovertible inculcate infrastructure interpolate irony jejune kinetic kowtow laissez faire lexicon loquacious

lugubrious metamorphosis mitosis moiety nanotechnology nihilism nomenclature nonsectarian notarize obsequious oligarchy omnipotent orthography oxidize parabola paradigm parameter pecuniary photosynthesis plagiarize plasma polymer precipitous quasar quotidian recapitulate reciprocal reparation respiration sanguine soliloquy subjugate suffragist supercilious tautology taxonomy tectonic tempestuous thermodynamics totalitarian unctuous usurp vacuous vehement vortex winnow wrought xenophobe yeoman ziggurat