Screw Mentors, Get Yourself a Benefactor
"Screw Mentors, Get Yourself a Benefactor," a posting to Craig Mazin's The Artful Writer that explores the not-obvious — but worth understanding — difference between the two.
Comments
I have complex feelings for this particular article. It seems to me that Craig Mazin defines mentors as someone who is not useful to a writer, and then tells writers to ditch them for being useless. Well, yes, if all your mentor does for you is chomp on his proverbial cigar and say, "You're gonna make it kid." That's a realationship that will only take you so far.
But I disagree with his implication that someone has to be paying you in order to give you good advice... or a swift kick in the ass.
I also think it's interesting to read this article in light of the more recent post about writer friends. Apparently it is okay to have writer friends who are radically more successful than you... just don't call them mentors.
While I am also not entirely persuaded by Mazin's argument, it is definitely an issue that bears serious consideration by those who are being mentored and/or benefactored.
One should keep asking oneself from time to time, "Am I getting good advice from the people who give me advice?" And if the people giving the advice have no compelling stake in making sure that they give good advice (a financial stake, say), that's one more thing to make the mentee/benefactee wonder.
That said, an argument like Mazin's with which one doesn't quite agree is usually even better (that is, more useful) than one with which one agrees wholeheartedly, because it forces a serious examination, rather than wholesale adoption.