Nalo Hopkinson, writing mentor for hire

Award-winning sf writer and teacher Nalo Hopkinson has an interesting new authorial business-model: she's offering $2,000 intensive, one-on-one mentorships to budding writers, via email. She's got some health problems so she's only taking on a few students, and will work personally with them to improve their work and their skills.

It's basically an audience-funded writer-in-residency; I benefited immensely from writers in residence, especially Judith Merril. This model looks good, but it'd be even better if some charitable foundation would give Nalo and a few other writers rotating grants to do this. I'd certainly kick in $500 towards a scholarship fund for a budding writer to get the kind of instruction I got, as part of paying it forward.

Nalo is a wonderful writer: accomplished, smart, wildly imaginative. This is a hell of an opportunity.

Your joy in the art of creating fiction is important to me. I cannot predict whether you will be a successful writer. I can't even reliably tell you whether you have talent or not; those are puddings that are very hard to prove. But I love it when a light goes on behind a student's eyes because they've perceived something new about the craft of writing that they can't wait to try out. My goals are: to help you write the story you want to write, not the one I would write; to help you develop an intuitive, body-based sense of the rhythm, structure and movement of a story. (I've discovered that when it comes to art, content and container are the same thing.) At the same time, I'm committed to challenging your skills and your understanding of what fiction does and how it works. I won't dish out empty flattery. I will be honest with you about what I perceive the strengths and weaknesses of your writing to be, and I aim to do so as one peer addressing another.

Interested in being mentored by me? (via IO9)

• [mjd]

  This would be an interesting new business model for an author who was interested in abandoning the old business model, but going by her website, this is definitely not such an author: http://nalohopkinson.com/copyright_notice

• [nosehat]

  I sincerely hope she has drawn up a contract that clearly stipulates exactly what her responsibilities are (and aren’t) in this arrangement.

  I wish her the best of luck with this! But I can also imagine this turning into a nightmare situation with a belligerent, aggressive, needy leech-like student who demands that she fix years of backlogged unfixable prose, then gets angry when it isn’t immediately sold.

• [steelwraith]

  Uhhhhh.. no.

  Thank you very much for playing and here are some lovely parting gifts…. truthfully tho, if I need someone to be my mentor/coach/therapist/whatever maybe I shouldn’t be trying to write for money and be writing for me.. and my gigantic ego.. because I don’t think a couple of grand to an established writer is going to make me that much better a writer.

  What’s worked for me? Facetime with other writers, at 0230 over bad coffee (Denny’s).. if you can’t see the body language you can’t see if they’re lying to you. And I live by brutally honest feedback..

  And BTW writing for me is an addiction, but not a job.

• [Dreamshadow]

  I’d sign up for the chance for a scholarship (or apply for one, either way).

• [quesie]

  I did this with up to ten students a year. Now I would only do five, because I was the “too devoted” type and couldn’t do anything else when I was working with their manuscripts.

  $2k is the bargain of the year. Being mentored by a great writer is like having a great therapist, coach, teacher, inside trader… you name it. It’s like being the sorcerer’s apprentice, except you don’t get stuck with the mad broomsticks and the whirlpool.

  I’ve known and published Nalo for a long time; she’s remarkable and anyone would be lucky to sit at her knee.

  And no, she has no idea I wrote this! ;-)

• [Anonymous]

  I sympathize with Nalo, and she’s getting endorsements from people I respect like Cory, so I’m sure she’s legit. But this looks suspiciously like the dozens of other ‘writing coach’ scams that are out there. Someone who sees your recommendation but can’t afford $2k is going to search and notice that there are other, cheaper alternatives — without knowing that almost all of them are scams.

  How can you recommend projects like this, knowing that they drive people toward scams like PublishAmerica’s ‘Book Coach’ program?

  Please, at least put a line in your article that most people like this are trying to scam new artists, but you vouch for the legitimacy of this one.