Using Mentor Texts

This page has resources related to using mentor texts in creative writing.

Mentor texts are pieces of literature that you can return to and reread for many different purposes. They are texts to be studied and imitated … Mentor texts help writers to take risks and be different writers tomorrow than they are today. It helps them to try out new strategies and formats.

--”Reading, Writing, and Mentor Texts: Imagining Possibilities” from National Writing Project

Questions for examining a text through a writer’s lens:

• What do you notice? What stands out to you in the piece?

• What words, phrases and details stand out to you?

• What do you notice about ___________?

• What do you notice about the writing style? What aspects of the writing style stand out to you?

• What do you notice about the structure of the piece?

• What do you notice about sentence structure? Which sentences stand out to you?

• What is the mood or tone of the piece? How did the author accomplish this tone? What word choices, syntactical choices, structural choices or stylistic choices contribute to the mood or tone?

• What words, phrases and details made you want to know more? What words, phrases and details made you want to keep reading?

• How did the author capture your attention? Try to describe what the author did 

• How would you describe this piece to someone else? 

• Write a statement describing a theme that the author is exploring in this piece.

• Describe the author’s use of __________ in this piece.

• What does the author do masterfully in the piece?

• What can another writer imitate? What can another writer learn and practice from reading this piece?

Questions from 14 Questions for Examining Mentor Texts (Of Any Kind) by Gil Teach:

• Which elements of the piece would you most like to try on your current piece of writing?  How can you incorporate the techniques that you have analyzed in this piece into your own work?

• How does the writer grab a reader in the first sentence or few sentences?  Describe the specific technique that is used.

• Which details or descriptions or facts are most surprising, vivid, important, or memorable for whatever reason?

• How does the author draw your attention to those details?  What techniques are used?

• How do the details that you noticed contribute to the theme of the piece?

• How is the piece organized?  Make a very rough outline of what the author includes in the beginning, middle, and end. How might you imitate that structure?  How might the author’s choices in terms of organization be applied to your own writing?

• How does the author help the reader to transition from one part to the next?  What are some key words that signal a change or shift or movement to something new? 

• Which transition words/techniques do you find especially effective?  Why?

Introducing the Author

Examining how a piece works and the choices the author made can be even more enlightening when you also study the author's background, influences, writing process, and career. This provides context for the author's work, which can make it easier to view the writing as something that a real human being worked to develop in the course of his/her/their living, rather than as a miraculous masterpiece formed out of thin air by an inanimate being.

Ideas for including author information:

• author's biographical background: where born/raised/lived, childhood/upbringing, family, jobs/work/career, challenges faced

• identify and share an essential component of the writer's style - a component that the author uses successfully or uses often - show examples in the piece

• share the author's nonfiction writing - especially essays and letters in which the author discusses writing

• show students a "window on the author's writing process" - journal writing, notes, manuscript pages with corrections, process reflections, etc. - "to counter the impression that the book along inevitably gives: that the finished book appeared just as it is, magically, or at least by a process absolutely distinct from the students' own writing processes" (Moran, 1981)

• author interviews (video, audio, transcript)

Creative Writing as a Preface for Literary Study

Moran (1981) describes how to introduce a unit with a creative writing prompt to accompany study of the novel:

1. Identify an “essential component" of the author's writing style - a component that the author uses successfully or uses often - What does the author do masterfully in the piece? What can another writer imitate? What can another writer learn and practice from reading this piece?

2. Ask students to perform this same act in their creative writing, before they read the piece. Prepare a writing assignment that would cause students to do something that the author does in the piece (20 minutes of writing).

Doing this before reading a literary piece improves students’ comprehension of and appreciation for literature - helps students understand what the author is doing, and they can therefore appreciate it - the assignment allows students to do what the author has done before they see it, and they come to a fundamental understanding of the technique and are able to appreciate it when they finally do read it.

Creative Writing as Imaginative Response

 Knoeller (2003) uses creative writing prompts as a form of reader response that allows students to engage with texts in greater depth and from previously unexamined perspectives. He defines specific strategies such as:

• “writing in like-genre”—writing in the same genre as the mentor text

• “multigenre response”—writing several imaginative pieces in a number of genres in response to a single literary work

• “dependent authorship”—writing an extension of an existing text 

Knoeller explains that this type of response “contributes to more insightful formal analysis… engages students with a text, enriches their appreciation, and yields valuable insights into interpreting the work.” In particular, it leads students to engage in close and “focused” rereading, “repeatedly consulting the text… so that their writing is detailed and faithful to the original.” Knoeller suggests using imaginative response exercises after they have read the text but prior to assigning an expository writing, explaining that “after students have explored a work imaginatively, their interpretations are considerably more thoughtful and complex” (43).

Literary Study as "Problem Solving"

In his course on short story writing, Schiller (1954) centered creative writing as the impetus which drives choices in literary study. He outlined the following stages of the course curriculum: 

1. Begin the course by assigning students to write their first short story. 

2. As students work on this assignment outside of class, lead students in studying assigned readings that examine story structure and necessary characteristics of a story, and have students perform at least one detailed analysis of a story. 

3. After a few weeks, students submit the first draft of their stories and they begin discussing their work and giving one another feedback. 

4. In addition, the instructor meets individually with students about their writing and assigns additional readings based on their interests and needs. As the course progresses, the selection of readings “arises directly out of the problems encountered by the students” (113). 

While taking this approach to literature means that fewer readings can be assigned overall since students will need time to work on and discuss their writing, there are many more individually-assigned readings that students tend to read “keenly and knowingly, with admiration and pleasure” because they are approaching the reading as a way to examine possible solutions to a difficulty or problem that they are encountering in the draft of their own story. It allows students and instructors to deal with literature “not only as a thing which has been done, but as a thing to do,” and feedback is focused less on judgment and more on identifying particular literary craft problems and examining how other authors have handled similar challenges (116).

Author's Writing Style Guides

Creative Writing Lessons that Use Mentor Texts

References

14 Questions for Examining Mentor Texts (Of Any Kind) by Gil Teach

Armstrong, Patricia. “Bloom’s Taxonomy.” Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University, 2010.

Bishop, Wendy. “Crossing the Lines: On Creative Composition and Composing Creative Writing.” Writing on the Edge, vol. 4, no. 2, 1993, pp. 117–33.

Everett, Nick. “Creative Writing and English.” The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 3, 2005, pp. 231–42.

Fuss, Diana, and William A. Gleason. The Pocket Instructor Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Knoeller, Christian. “Imaginative Response: Teaching Literature through Creative Writing.” The English Journal, vol. 92, no. 5, May 2003, p. 42.

Lopate, Phillip. “Research and Personal Writing.” Creative Nonfiction, no. 43, 2011, pp. 65–66.

Moran, Charles. “Teaching Writing/Teaching Literature.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 32, no. 1, Feb. 1981, p. 21.

National Writing Project. “Reading, Writing, and Mentor Texts: Imagining Possibilities.” National Writing Project Archive, 28 Mar. 2013.

Prose, Francine. Reading like a Writer : A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Union Books, 2012.

Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World : Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. Catapult, 2021.

Schiller, Andrew. “The Use of Creative Writing in the Teaching of Literature.” College English, vol. 16, no. 2, Nov. 1954, p. 110.

Stodola, Sarah. Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors. Amazon Publishing, 2015.

Thompson, Sean, and Deborah K. Reed. "Using Mentor Texts to Learn From the Best and Improve Students’ Writing." Iowa Reading Research Center, 2000.

Yuval Noah Harari. 21 Lessons for the 21St Century. Random House, 2019.