This month, we encourage you to identify three to five mentor texts that you can use to improve your writing. A mentor text is a book written in the same genre as your story, targets the same audience or explores comparable themes. It can also be set in the same time period as your work-in-progress or feature characters that face similar conflicts. Spend the next weeks reading through your mentor texts to study how other writers crafted dialogue, navigated between scenes or ramped up drama. As you read, make notes of the things you liked. Share with us the texts you chose and what you discovered. Then, be on the lookout for future posts here that dig deeper into how to get the most out your mentor texts.
As we enter another month of social distancing amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all made adjustments to how, when, where or even whether we’re writing. Perhaps you find yourselves with more time on your hands and you’ve been able to do more writing than ever before. Or, maybe your once free moments to work on your manuscript have been replaced with juggling work-from-home responsibilities while homeschooling your children. So how do you keep up a writing routine during such an uncertain time?