Mentoring

Mentoring is best suited for the serious writer who is just starting out. Perhaps you’ve never been part of a writing group, you’ve not read much writing instruction, but you think you have a winner story. Perhaps your family or church group or students, who have heard you read a chapter or two, have told you how much they want to see the book in print. You’re encouraged and hopeful, until your first attempts to find an agent or editor meet with form rejection letters.

It could be that you are close to publication, but there are fiction techniques you haven’t yet mastered. Mentoring is designed to teach the nuances of fiction writing using your own story, not unrelated writing exercises.

There is a lot of flexibility built into mentoring. The client submits the first fifty pages of a manuscript for a substantive edit. He then makes changes and may resubmit for a second, third, fourth, fifth pass—however few or many evaluations he wishes. The focus is to help the writer master fiction techniques and scene structure which he can utilize in the rest of his manuscript.

The fee for mentoring is $6 per page on the first pass (using the industry standard of 250 words per page), $3 per page on the second, and $1 per page each succeeding time the writer submits the work.

As with the other services, please format your manuscript in keeping with that which agents and editors require. Here are the basics:

12 point Times New Roman font
Double spaced
No extra line between paragraphs
Margins set at one inch, for both sides and top/bottom
The beginning of each paragraph indented (a half inch)
A “slug” included in the header: Author last name / Title / Page number

Writers wishing this type of edit should transmit their manuscript electronically using Microsoft Word. Substantive edits will be in a separate document. Copy edits will be made using Word’s “Track Changes” feature.

If you’re interested in discussing mentoring, please contact me by leaving a comment or by emailing me at rluellam at yahoo dot com. Please include your genre and the approximate length of your manuscript.