As one of the many classes (hoops) I have to take (jump through) to get my graduate degree (societal confirmation of higher learning) in Writing for Children (writing for…no, that’s about right, writing for children), my institute of higher learning requires that I complete a “mentorship.” Because my spellchecker informs me that this is not a word, I feel I should probably explain.
For an entire semester, we budding writers are handed over to a working professional already in the business, usually an editor within a publishing house or something of equal caliber. We work through a manuscript together, from conception to inception to (ofttimes) rejection, just like a REAL writer would. It’s a tempting taste of false success: we have a real-life editor looking over our real-life manuscripts, guiding us by the proverbial hand through the actual process of writing an honest to goodness book!
Of course, once the mentorship is over, there is no guarantee that your hard work with this editor will pay off. After all, she was paid by the school (who was actually paid by you) to hold your hand throughout the entire process. No loyalties exist beyond the end of the semester and once that last bit of revision is turned in and that grade is posted, the mentorship is over. You go back to being a graduate student with a half-finished manuscript liberally marked in the unforgiving red pen of your fake editor. When graduation and the real world comes a-rearing their frightening heads, you do with that old prose what you will…revise it and submit and prepare for Twilight-y fame and Harry-Potter-esque fortune, or you go work in a bookstore and start a blog. Or do a little of both and just hope for the best.
Thus is the mentorship. Heck, the entire grad-school experience, really.
With this floating recently in my mind, I’ve starting speculating on how all artists experience a sort of this thing, whether it be organized by a school or not. As much as we may not readily admit it, we seek out mentors for guidance. Maybe not just that…we seek out inspiration in general. No truly great idea comes from no where and, as the cryptic sign on my third grade teacher’s wall once said: “The best ideas come from the work, not from the head.” Art classified as “creation” is somewhat of a misnomer. I think that “creation” implies something out of nothing and this, dear people, is ridiculously impossible. At least for anything GOOD.
Although I’m a religiously minded person, I don’t believe that God came out of nowhere and made the world out of nothing. Not nothing at all, no. If He, in all His wisdom, wanted us to emulate His example in word and deed, He wouldn’t dare give us such a lofty, impossible goal; what a cruel god, indeed. Instead, we do as He probably did: we create out of experience, we create out of inspiration, we create out of existing materials be they tangible or not. We hold out our hands willy-nilly to the whirling world, grasping for a mentor, a moment or memory that will sustain us or, better yet, launch us into a new level of understanding that will assist us in our creation. I don’t like the phrase “Intelligent Design” and I don’t think it applies to our own attempt at art (is everything we do designed or even intelligent? Well, maybe for God…but not for me.) Instead, maybe it’s an act of Divine Reorganization. Providential Production? Historically Inspired Restructuring. I don’t know. Maybe just re-creation would do me for now.
I write stories, not because I feel this need to create a new world, but to show others how I see the existing one.
