 How to find a writing mentor, what a writing mentor does, and alternatives to consider if a writing mentorship isn't right for youFull disclosure: I am a writing mentor, and I love what I do.
With that said, I’m a terrible businesswoman because I typically spend the initial 15-minute discovery call with potential clients trying to determine if there’s an alternative (cheaper) option to working with me that would still give them the help that they’re looking for. There very often is, and unless you’re supported by some kind of grant or bursary, working with a mentor can get expensive. There are also a whole host of advantages to writing mentorships, of course, not least being that you’ll have an experienced writer in your corner who’s almost certainly fought every one of your writing battles themselves, and who will passionately cheerlead your work like you can’t even imagine, because we get super invested in our clients’ success. In this post, I’m going to suggest some questions to ask yourself before you start looking for a mentor, some places to find and connect with us, and some free or low-cost alternatives to embarking on a mentorship.
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 Give your writing its best chance of success in competitionsMy short story publishing career kicked off with a competition win. So did my novel publishing career. If you’re a subscriber to my newsletter, you’ll already know that I put great store in writing competitions as a springboard for emerging writers* – I publish a monthly run-down of the best competitions I can find – and if you’ve ever been in one of my classes, I’ve probably tried to persuade you to enter the Bridport, the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, or the Mairtín Crawford Award, and possibly all three. And more besides. The thing is, writing competitions are much more of a level playing field than subbing to magazines. For one thing, your publication history has zero influence on where you place in a competition, and most are read blind. For another, an overwhelmed editing desk might very well decide that they’ve got enough strong stories in one reading period to carry them over a weaker round of submissions a month later and accept none of the fiction sent to them in July. A competition, on the other hand, will always have a winner, and probably a couple of runners up too. It’s the only submission venue where you can guarantee that someone will be successful in any given round.
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