On Bad Writing Mentors

Hello, hello,

Another week, another newsletter — I wonder if we’ll still have a PM by the time this one goes out? Thanks, as always for reading…

On Bad Writing Mentors

Before I start, I should probably provide some caveats straight off the bat. What I want to write about today is not bad mentors per se. In fact, I might well have titled today’s post: Bad Mentees or maybe Bad Mentoring Relationships. I suppose what I really want to talk about is what sometimes happens when writing relationships — particularly relationships that are supposed to be supportive and creative — go wrong. What happens when the power dynamics get out of shift or intentions become misaligned. What I want to talk about is something that it is sometimes hard for us writers to admit — failure.

It happened as part of a writing fellowship. I’ve been fortunate in my career to have a number of great opportunities to get structured feedback on my work through various programmes and fellowships. As part of one of these opportunities, I was paired with a mentor. 

Let’s call him Richard.  

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Richard is an exceptional industry professional. He’s produced films across Europe. He has taught at one of the most prestigious universities for film and has an incredible pedigree. It soon became clear, however, that we didn’t see eye to eye on a number of aspects of the project that he was mentoring me on or what we wanted from the relationship. Richard, you see, came from a teaching background — and from a corner of the industry where a lot of filmmaking is based on a master-student relationship that is very traditional and, at least to my mind, pretty macho. He felt like his job — I’m pretty sure — was to make me a better writer.  

What I wanted from the relationship — and this is true of any kind of creative relationship I go into, whether it is with a script editor or a producer or a director — is to focus on the story and the project. I want to train my focus on them, rather than me, the writer. Of course, I recognise that to a certain extent this is a defence mechanism, a way of distancing myself from the work: if the work is bad, or the writing is bad, I tell myself, that doesn’t mean that I’m a bad writer or — by extension — a bad person. 

The results were not great.

Like many writers, I’m a pretty meek and mild personality: I hate conflict of any kind. But I also have a certain anti-authoritarian streak in me. While I may not shout and scream and throw my work, I am not averse to digging my heels in. 

And on his half, Richard doubled down on trying to break down the barriers that I was putting up. He wanted to draw the story out of me by digging into my psyche. He believed in a kind of romantic ideal: that all great writing somehow spills forth from self-diagnosis and self-examination. This may, of course, be true — and I’m sure it’s my failure as a writer that I was unable to open up, but the long and the short of it is that the more Richard focused on me: was I a good writer?, was I authentic writer?, the more I clammed up.

I started to second guess myself, became hesitant; I started putting things in the script that weren’t true, but were what I thought he wanted. The kind of things he might feel were true because they met the ideal of what he thought good writing was. 

For Richard, sooner or later, this meant everything coming back to sex. Now, I’ll be honest, sex isn’t the central theme of my work — and it certainly wasn’t what I wanted to explore in the project we were working on. This script is set in a very dangerous, dystopian situation. It is about a young woman who finds herself on her own and stumbles across an older man and his daughter in the wilderness. Over a period of time, they come to trust each other — and create a sort of family.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the relationship between the protagonist and the man she meets should be anything more than platonic, that the circumstances of their dangerous existence wouldn’t allow for any time for romance. Richard thought differently. He regaled me with tales of an affair he’d had as a younger man with an older woman and explained how people in extreme circumstances find comfort in each other. What’s more natural he asked? And so, trying to please him, I wrote in a sexual relationship, one that I didn’t believe in, and which remains in the script to this day. Every time I read it back, it gives me the ick.

Which is not to say that Richard was wrong — there are as many stories as there are grains of sand in the desert. If I was a different writer (perhaps a better writer), I’m sure I could have made the relationship of the characters in my script work. But I’m not sure that the characters were the real issue: the issue was my relationship with Richard.

What went wrong was not any particular suggestion or piece of advice, but our inability to be honest from the start about what we wanted from the mentorship and how we wanted to work. I wanted to please Richard, rather than push him to be the mentor I needed: and because of that, I did neither.

On joining a tennis club across town

Last year, possibly in a fit of madness brought on by lockdown, we signed up to a tennis club we’d visited a couple of times with friends who were members. I thought it would be a nice incentive for us to do more exercise (nothing like a whacking great annual membership hanging over your head to get you out of bed on a weekend). And the club is gorgeous. Five well-maintained courts in sheltered surroundings, lots of kids and families about, a relaxed feel ( which is important for us who are, to be frank, not very good and need the people on neighbouring courts to not get upset when a stray ball zings their way).

The only slight problem is that the club is about five miles across town — with a three-quarters of an hour bus ride for us to get there.

Now you might think we would find this quite the damper on our ardour for exercise. However, once we gave up the idea that we would be the kind of people who would “just nip out and knock a few balls around for half an hour”, we have found it incredibly freeing. Now, our regular tennis games are a little adventure, allowing us to escape our small corner of town and experience the city afresh. We walk through new neighbourhoods in sports gear and swinging tennis rackets like we live there; a regular, strange little holiday.

I’ve been reading… RAINBOW MILK by Paul Mendez

RAINBOW MILK was a big hit in 2020, gaining all kinds of plaudits and prizes for its first-time author Paul Mendez. It’s a thrilling debut, centred around Jesse McCarthy, a young Black Man from the midlands, who breaks free from his strict upbringing in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses to live the life as a young gay man in London. It is semi-autobiographical and leans heavily on a style of life-writing that can be both thrilling, allowing us to enter deeply into Jesse’s experience, but is also liable to drift. For example, Mendez writes lengthy criticism of the music that Jesse listens to — which was obviously formative to him but comes across with less punch than I think he hopes. Nevertheless, it is a powerful and engrossing read: I hoovered the book up in a couple of days.

I’ve been visiting… Elizabeth Frink’s BIRDMAN at the Sottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Wandering around the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art last weekend, I stumbled across BIRDMAN in a room on its ground floor devoted to the work of the English sculptor Elizabeth Frink. The statue is of a thin, tentative figure standing, it feels to me, extremely vulnerably. What should be wings sprouting from its back are foreshortened stumps, perhaps as though the wings have been snapped off. The face is scrunched up in worry or pain.

The work is said to have been inspired by Léo Valentin, a French parachutist and aerialist who attempted human flight using wooden wings. He died tragically in Liverpool in 1956 when one of his stunts went wrong. It’s probably narcissism, but for me, there’s a symbol of the writer or artist in the figure: someone who attempts the impossible — to soar — but in doing so stands fragile, unguarded and liable to hurt.

All my best,

James.