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MENTORING MY SON
by Barbara Beckwith
What’s it like to mentor a writer who’s also a family member?
My son Anthony has been writing a memoir about growing up in Cambridge, MA, in the 60s and 70s. It’s also about how he became who he is now.
He wrote it thinking he’d give it only to family and friends; but when he shared it with me, I thought it was a terrific story, one that deserved a wider audience. His reflections on his identity were fascinating and could inspire readers to ponder the sources of their own.
Plus, the only other growing-up-in-Cambridge memoir we could find was by Marian Cannon Schlesinger, born two generations earlier in 1912 to a prominent family (ours isn’t).
I offered to give him some “suggestions.” He was shocked at how many. But he recovered, especially since I was acting as a mentor, not as an editor who told him what to do.
He soon caught on to the power of short sentences, strong nouns, and active verbs. He willingly deleted every “very,” realizing that his lively anecdotes needed no intensifiers. He came to accept that a crucial scene might take hours to revise. His declared, “it’s done,” many times before it was.
When Anthony said he wanted to acknowledge me as his editor, I declined. I was happy being his mentor, sharing suggestions for him to take or leave. He is now a member of the NWU-Boston Chapter. His first printing of My Ride Through Life will come out this fall.
So if a family member asks for your help with a debut book, my advice is to do so as a mentor, allowing your mentee to say, as Sinatra did, “I did it my way.”
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