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Fiction Mentorships
Fiction Mentorships

Have you ever wished you had your own mentor or editor on tap?

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Your Fiction Writing Mentorship

Have you ever wished you had your own mentor or editor on tap? Someone who can answer your writing questions? Your publishing questions? And someone qualified to offer feedback on your writing?

Hone your writing with expert personal guidance

We have a limited number of fiction mentorships available each year. The mentorships provide you a one-on-one relationship with your mentor to help you hone your writing and give you the guidance you need to kickstart or finish your novel.

Your mentorship is for a minimum period of six months. One of the key aims of the program is to help you gain confidence in your creative writing skills and in the direction of your story. Time is a critical part of the writing process, and it is important to take it slowly and develop your skills.

Through your individual online classroom, you will be able to:

  • Ask your mentor questions about writing issues
  • Upload your writing so that your mentor can provide feedback on it.

As your personal mentoring space is online, you can access it from wherever you are: at work, at home, on holidays, while travelling – wherever you are connected to the internet. Importantly, your “conversations” with your mentor remain on your personal mentoring page so that you can refer back to your mentor’s advice whenever you need to.

What is the aim of the Mentorship?

  • You will be put on a clear path to writing your novel.
  • You will feel more confident in your approach to your writing.
  • Your mentor will be available to answer your publishing and writing questions.

What does a mentorship involve?

Your mentorship will involve a combination of:

(a) Answers to writing-related questions.
These might be queries about characterisation, point-of-view, the mix of dialogue and narrative and about the overall effectiveness of the writing, especially for the opening paragraph and chapter. You are welcome to:

Post up to three short writing-related questions per week. We expect these are short questions requiring only short answers.
You will receive responses to your queries each week.

(b) Feedback on your actual writing.

Over the six-month period, you are welcome to submit your writing – a chapter or two at a time – so that your mentor can provide feedback to you. Your feedback will take a minimum of two weeks to be provided to you. You should wait until you receive this feedback before submitting additional materials to your mentor.

You can submit up to 70,000 words over the six-month period. Once you reach the 70,000-word limit, you are unable to submit any more, but you are still welcome to ask questions to your mentor.

To this end, we strongly recommend spreading your writing submissions over the six-month period. You might consider either:

  • submitting about 11,000 words every month
  • submitting about 23,000 words every two months

You may choose to rework your writing based on feedback and submit the same chapters. Or you may choose to submit fresh work that your mentor has not seen before. It’s up to you to chat with your mentor about the approach that best suits your project.

We do not recommend that you submit 70,000 words in one go.

Who will drive the Mentorship process?

YOU. That’s right – you. Your mentor will be committed to answering your queries and giving you feedback on your work in a timely manner. However, your mentor will NOT chase you to submit queries or written work. It’s important that you drive this part of the process. Your mentor is there to provide guidance on your writing – their role is not to hold a stick over you or hold you accountable to write more of your novel. If you feel you need someone to do this, you may prefer to engage a life coach.

The mentorship process is a collaborative one, just like the author/editor relationship, and the author and mentor may negotiate variations to the process to allow for holidays or similar.

What can you expect from your mentor?

Timely responses to queries or feedback on writing as agreed.

Your mentor will be advising on the overall content and structure of the work. You should not expect that their work would be copy-edited (line edited). Your mentor will not be editing for grammar and punctuation in your manuscript.
The length of responses will vary – some will be very short, and others will be longer. Even the responses to the chapters presented will vary in length. The responses will be as long as is necessary to communicate the mentor’s considered opinion.

How can you apply for a fiction mentorship?

In order for us to determine whether you are ready for a fiction mentorship, you need to a complete the fiction mentorship application form. The form is included at the bottom of this page.

Why do you need to apply?
We want to ensure that you’re going to benefit from participating in the fiction mentorship. Therefore, we will only accept you into the program if we think you are ready to be mentored.

The truth is that some writers would like to embark on a fiction mentorship when they are not quite ready for it. We promise to be upfront and truthful with you from the outset and will only accept you for the program if we truly believe that you are going to benefit from the experience.

Fiction Mentorship Mentor

Cathie Tasker

Cathie is an experienced writing tutor, editor and publisher. She has worked as an editor and publisher with HarperCollins, Scholastic Australia and Koala Books. She also worked as Marketing Manager for Koala Books and as a Book Club Editor at Scholastic Australia. In her career, Cathie has edited and commissioned about 800 books, many of which went on to become bestsellers and win awards.

Cathie has edited novels and picture books for dozens of authors, including Bruce Pascoe, Nat Amoore, Charmaine Ledden-Lewis, Dub Leffler, Jackie French, Wendy Orr, Garth Nix, Mem Fox, Cathy Wilcox, Bruce Whatley, Jennifer Fallon, Garry Disher, and three Australian Writers’ Centre presenters:  Pamela Freeman, Judith Rossell and Sue Whiting.

She has judged and convened panels for numerous literary awards including the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year awards, the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the Aurealis Awards, and IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People). Cathie also updated the Australasian entries for The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (2nd ed, 2015).

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Key information

Who is eligible to apply for mentorship?

In order to apply for a fiction mentorship, you must have completed any two of the following courses at the Australian Writers’ Centre:

If you have not completed at least two of the courses you are not eligible for mentoring.

Cost of mentorship

Application fee: $50
Mentorship fee: $750 per month for a minimum of six months

How to apply

Click the button below for detailed information about what is required for the application. 

APPLICATION PAGE