Mentors

There’s a compulsion. Maybe it's writing. Taking photos. Making music. Whatever your compulsion is. How do you take it and turn it into a life doing it.

I knew from a young age that I was a writer. For a long time, though, I didn’t know what to do with it. Although that didn’t matter. I did it for its own sake and will always do it, even if no-one else sees it. 

Maybe you have to keep a pencil and paper near you at night in case you wake up with bits of a story or a painting or song. You really want to sleep, but you know if you do, it’ll be gone. You forever half-remember the ghost of those disappeared ideas. You don’t want to experience it again.

I was watching a video by Van Neistat, who talks about finding his calling. Van is Casey Neistat’s brother, he has a fantastic YouTube channel. His film on escaping the LA wildfires is very strong.

His own calling is to make videos. They are very good. When he started out, there was no such thing as making money from creating the type of films that he does. There was no YouTube. But there was the compulsion. 

Neistat’s mentor was the artist Tom Sachs. For years, when he thought he’d had an original idea, Neistat come across something Sachs had done in a gallery, usually with an earlier date on it. Mentors leave an imprint.

Neistat says he forgot that making videos was his calling twice in his life. The second time, he wanted to try and be a gallery artist. He talked to Tom Sachs. Sachs told him, he should be doing videos. Tom Sachs turned out to be right. 

I was lucky to have mentors. When you think of it, given how long it takes to build skills, how many mistakes one does, they must have been very patient. 

My uncle Finlay would say to me, ‘Iain Finlay, sometimes you wear your learning very lightly on your sleeve’ and ‘you have to get better. Or else what will you do when I’m gone?’. He was my version of Tom Sachs. It would take too long to list what I learnt, but the first and main thing was, he made me feel that it was ok to be a writer. Coming from a place where the utility of things is important, it was important to get permission (in a way) to pursue something with no obvious immediate utilty. Also to feel, the culture of the place I come from, is precious.

Your own experience and voice is also precious. Individual.  Worth developing.

I learnt a lot from other mentors. How to think like an artist but work like an accountant. How to research, structure and produce work. How to produce 2500 words a day. How to add twists to an ending. How to work hard. Shape a story. How to keep at it. 

Working in the arts or in tv, if you’re willing to ask questions, people will help. The questions are the thing. 

Mentors are important because there will be people who will tell you that you shouldn’t be doing the thing you’re doing. Or sometimes, what you’ve created might actually not be so great, we are learning after all. And you have to find a way to deal with people telling you that and carry on. Or to carry on if you’re unhappy with a piece of your work. Once I had John MacGrath tell me my story wasn’t very good at all. How to keep on going? Luckily, the compulsion. 

Neistat’s advice to young people is, if you don’t find your calling by twenty-five, you should look at whatever skills you have and they can make you the most money possible. You’ll never have the same energy again, as you do in your twenties. I’m not sure I agree.

If you decide to take your craft seriously and make the sacrifices that entails, it takes time to not only develop your skills, but to make your way in an industry. The bassist Tal Wilkenfeld calls it ‘the jagged lifestyle’. It’s not a liner progression. And sometimes you just need to do something else to make money for whatever reason. 

How do you hold onto that original golden feeling when you were creating freely, discovering it, when you have to make a living from it. It’s another skill to learn. Sometimes, being a professional writer isn’t easy. If Kurz had been one, instead of saying ‘the horror! the horror!’, he would have said ‘the notes! the notes!’

Maybe finding and keeping something which is just for you, maybe that’s important. A place you can write which is just for you. No notes from anyone.

As Charlie Munger said, your mentors don’t need to be alive. Find mentorship where you can. And keep going. Just keep going.

END.


SOME EXTRA RESOURCES

Here is Van Neistat's film on YouTube - The Value of Mentorship.

In Scotland, Playwrights' Studio Scotland and Scottish Books Trust are both places which run great mentoring schemes.


In case it is of interest, I did a short story for the BBC Radio 4 series 'Short Works' series. You can find it on iPlayer here. It is called 'The Third Wave' and is about the Iolaire disaster.

I also have a bilingual Substack which explore the places, history and stories of Gaelic Scotland here - https://iainfmacleoid.substack.com

Thanks for reading.

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