One of the best ways to develop your freelance writing career is to get help from someone who has been there and done it all before. Choosing a mentor for your writing career can help you avoid some of the pitfalls that trap other writers. It’s a way of giving yourself a head start in creating your own successful writing business. So, how do you select the perfect mentor? Read on to find out.

Where Are You Going?

You don’t have to know it all to choose a mentor, but it helps to have some idea of the areas you want to focus on. You might end up choosing others after you have talked, but it provides a starting point? Why is this important? Because you will need to make sure that your mentor knows enough about your chosen areas to guide you appropriately. If you want to know about web content writing, there’s no point in choosing a mentor whose experience is mainly in print journalism.

Where Have They Been?

One of the first things to do when choosing a mentor is to check them out. Even before you talk to them see what you can find online, check out their publishing credits and see if they show up on writing forums or writing blogs. You can find out a lot about people by reading their blogs and assessing the advice they give and how they handle comments. Once you have checked them out, it’s time to take the next step.

Talk To Them

Find out if your potential mentor is available for mentoring. Explain what you are looking for and see how this person can help. The talking process is about establishing whether you have chemistry. You need to get along with the person who will be helping you to shape your career.  Look for someone who seems knowledgeable and patient – you’ll be asking a lot of questions at the start. See if the person has a genuine interest in seeing you flourish.

Practicalities

One of the key qualities of mentors is that they need to be accessible, though there are no hard and fast rules for how this is to happen. Some people prefer the personal touch. If you want face to face conversation, then you need to find a mentor who lives close by so you can schedule regular meetings. However, these days you are not limited to your locality. Thanks to VOIP phones and instant messaging, your mentor could live anywhere in the world, giving you a much wider pool to choose from. In that case, the most important consideration is whether you are technologically compatible – are you both on Skype? Do you use the same IM system?

Working With A Mentor

Once you have found your ideal mentor, it’s time to get to work. A typical session will last an hour, and you may need a few sessions to get the best from the mentoring experience. In your first session, your mentor will want to know about your experience and your priorities and your assessment of the challenges you face. Some mentors give you a questionnaire to help you to identify those; others prefer to have an informal – and more relaxing – chat. It doesn’t matter what the method is; it just matters that you communicate. That’s the session where you will probably set out a plan for future sessions so you can plan what you are going to cover.

Beyond The Beginning

Once you know what you are talking about, then there are different patterns the sessions might follow. In some sessions, you will be doing a lot of talking, answering your mentor’s questions to try to get to the root of an issue. In others, the mentor will be doing most of the talking, laying out an issue so that you can understand it. This is when your work in choosing a mentor will have paid off, as communication should be clear and easy to understand. Expect a recap of key points at the end of a session, as well as action points for you to follow up.

Expectations

A successful relationship with a mentor should give you new ideas for developing your career. It should suggest sources of revenue or work and ways of promoting yourself to achieve your aims. It should extend the ideas you already have and challenge you to find new approaches. Ideally the relationship should be one of mutual respect and support. Eventually, you will not need the mentor as much, but in all likelihood you will have formed a lifelong relationship. A mentor cannot do the job for you, but can help you to do your job better.

The Money

Of course, all this great advice doesn’t come free. While you can learn a lot from reading blogs and chatting informally with other writers, the advantage of using a mentor is that the advice given is specific to where you are in your career right now. Just one tip could be the difference between failure and success, so be prepared to invest in your career. After all, you’re worth it.