Mentor Texts: The Magic Portal to Great Writing

Who It’s For: Writers who want to quickly and dramatically level up their writing skills.

What It Does: You’ll learn the professional’s secret to extracting powerful writing lessons from great books, old and new.

What You Get: Lifetime Access to the Full Workshop + PDF Handout.

The art of reading, analyzing and extracting writing insight from great books is a crucial skill that every writer must have.

No exceptions.

That’s Because:

1. You’re not reading the right books for your writing style and, most importantly…

2. You’re not reading books the right way – the way a professional writer does.

It’s time to fix that.

It’s time to extract all the writing wisdom of your favorite authors and put it to use in your writing.

The key that can instantly level up your writing by unlocking the wisdom of great authors, past and present?

MENTOR TEXTS.

Mentor Texts are existing examples of writing that can help you:

• Find the right publisher for your book by understanding precisely its in-house editorial preferences.

• Identify gaps in the market, and most powerfully…

• Understand, improve and master specific writing and storytelling techniques.

An example of the mentor text tools you’ll receive with the workshop. Roxanne will walk you through each tool, with specific instructions on how to maximize their impact.

Here’s the basic principle:

If you want to learn how to develop characters, read a work that has brilliantly crafted characters. If you want to understand pace, read books by authors who are masters of pace, and so on.

It seems simple but, in reality, it’s something that few writers are able to do effectively.

That’s because it’s much more than just reading a book or a passage. To benefit from mentor texts, writers must:

• Identify the specific problems they’re seeking to overcome, and pick books that directly demonstrate the right way to address the writing issue.

• Find mentor texts that are age-appropriate and directly relevant stylistically and thematically.

• Understand the four kinds of reading necessary to fully extract lessons from mentor texts: Elementary Reading, Inspectional Reading, Analytical Reading and Synoptical Reading.

• Know how to read like a working writer, not a casual reader.

• Know how to put these lessons to immediate and impactful use in their own work.

Professional writers who use mentor texts know how to identify the clues they’re looking for, isolate them, analyze them and put that knowledge to work on their own manuscripts.

In one workshop, Roxanne Troup, award-winning author of My Grandpa, My Tree, and Me (Ag Foundation’s Book of the Year) and Reaching for the Stars: A Mission to Space, will teach you everything you need to know about finding, analyzing and using the right mentor texts for your style, age group and genre.

Roxanne has used these techniques to have 22 kidlit books published in just the last 7 years, with more on the way!

Spend some time with Roxanne and you’ll have the wisdom the finest kidlit authors at your fingertips.

Any snag in your writing, any concerns about understanding the market, any fear that you “can’t write as well as the pros” can be put to rest by accessing the right mentor text at the right moment.

By the end of this workshop, you’ll be able to walk into any library, bookstore or online source and have the wisdom of the greatest authors of yesterday and today at your fingertips!

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Mentor Texts: The Magic Portal to Great Writing