On behalf of the Atlanta Writers Club (AWC), I recently launched an author mentorship program, adding it to the ever-growing list of opportunities we offer members. Within a week of announcing it, more than 40 members had applied to be mentored, and, in short order, I had about 30 mentors willing to help 1-2 mentees each.

The pent-up demand among writers who are in search of guidance and among authors who want to give back or pay it forward led me to reflect on my own experiences as mentee and mentor. When you’re starting out in the complex field of writing—with its intrinsic mix of totally subjective creativity and utterly brutal economic realities—you do not know what you don’t know. At that early stage, everyone else seems more knowledgeable and sophisticated, and therefore, everyone’s advice seems credible and correct.

If you’re lucky when you start asking other writers for guidance or they volunteer to share their hard-won wisdom with you, you get a mentor who will encourage you to develop your writing voice and dig into the themes that motivate you to keep writing while preparing you for the complicated road ahead, whatever your writing goals. I was not so fortunate. During my first few attempts at finding a mentor, I fell in with one writer after another who seemed to know what they were talking about but set about changing my writing voice and style to match their own until I no longer recognized my own manuscript or enjoyed working on it. Some punishing feedback at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival sent me back to square one and taught me a lesson about never taking all advice at face value.

Through the Atlanta Writers Club, I learned to think more critically about feedback and started a critique group that I’ve now run for more than 20 years, to help writers make their work better. I also met some authors who actually knew what they were talking about, but I was gun-shy and unwilling to let anyone else mentor me. And I could’ve benefited from the insights of those who had trod the path I was on. If I had been open once again to mentoring, I might have avoided spending six years represented by an agent who never sold any of my manuscripts to a publisher but kept promising that good things were just around the corner. I might not have quit writing for a few years in frustration. Maybe I could’ve been published sooner and built a bigger audience faster. In other words, for you few remaining On the Waterfront fans, “I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody.” Rather than getting a one-way ticket to Palooka-ville, though, I finally did get published and have managed to build an enthusiastic readership, but everything took much longer than I thought it would.

The older I get—yay, 59—the more stoic I become, so I reconcile myself with the assurance that everything that happened needed to happen. Which means that I was also fated to meet the late, great Terry Kay—author of To Dance with the White Dog and numerous other novels—through my work with the AWC and begin a decade of tutelage at the hands of a master motivator and author extraordinaire. I’ve blogged previously about the impact he had on me and dozens of other writers he encouraged, cajoled, and at times berated when we needed a kick in the pants to get us writing again.

Terry not only motivated me to keep going even when the words didn’t come together satisfactorily, he gave me a template for helping other writers: never tell someone how to write a character or scene but instead encourage them to remember why they were writing in the first place and what they wanted to say. Counseling about the business side of writing could flow more freely, because that was about strategy and probability rather than creativity. Every few days, a writer reaches out to me for advice; I try to respond as soon as possible because that’s what Terry always did for me.

As I launch my 33rd Atlanta Writers Conference—which has enabled innumerable writers move toward their publishing goals and sometimes achieve their wildest dreams—and now oversee a mentorship program that will help many more writers than I could ever assist individually, I realize that things did indeed happen just as they were meant to. My early frustrations and false starts primed me to be a healthy skeptic about taking other authors’ advice but also helped me to recognize a mentor who was the real deal. And those experiences opened me up to finding ways to help more and more writers avoid pitfalls and get on the fast track to realizing their ambitions.

I’ve told many people, “When I grow up, I want to be like Terry Kay.” Maybe as I close in on age 60, I’m taking some baby steps within the giant footprints he left behind.

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