Monthly Meeting: March 2025 - Author Meredith Davis

Meredith Davis is the author of THE MINOR MIRACLE and THE MINOR RESCUE, books one and two in THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF NOAH MINOR series (Waterbrook, 2024/25) and co-author of HER OWN TWO FEET: A RWANDAN GIRL’S BRAVE FIGHT TO WALK (Scholastic, 2019). She once worked at an independent children’s bookstore, started the Austin Chapter of SCBWI, and earned her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at VCFA. Find out more about Meredith in her Member Interview. 

Meeting Highlights:

What is a mentor text? 

A book (or source) that inspires you to write, or hone your craft.

Accordingly, mentor texts can be used for both inspiration and instruction.

How do you find a mentor text?

You read.

Ask yourself: what about this mentor text inspires you? 

Perhaps it is the way questions hang in the text for the reader to consider, or how the text implores the reader to reflect on themselves, or the way a traditional narrative is broken up by devices such as a character’s journal notes.

Ask yourself: what about this mentor text is informative or instructional? 

It could be that you gain a new understanding of how to use language, or of how certain words serve the world of a character, or of what parallels there are to your story or illustration ideas.

A mentor text can be something other than a book.

It might be a movie, play, comic book or video game.

A mentor text does not have to be in your genre.

It could be a poem that gives you the idea to use short, choppy sentences, for instance. Or, it could be a mentor source that gives you an idea of how to build suspense by distracting the reader to “look away” just for a moment.

Tips for finding mentor texts: 

• Look for the face out books on display in bookstores

• Find passionate review sites to research

• Discover what kids are reading and responding to right now (ask booksellers, librarians, teachers, parents, kids, and other writers)

Mentor texts are different than comp titles:  

Comps are all about marketing, benchmarking, and categorizing. There are industry rules surrounding comp titles, such as: it should be a well-known title, but not too popular. Also, a comp title should be recently published and match the tone and feel of your book.

Caveats:

• Check out Francine Prose’s READING LIKE A WRITER.
• If you feel stuck: read, read, read. Then you can find inspiration to write. 
• Sometimes, read out loud; the act of hearing a book being read is inspiring in its own right. 
• “Read first sentences … read final paragraphs … collect words like precious coins …” —Darcy Alvey
• If you read a paragraph from a mentor text and consider why it inspires you, then: “It’s a battery; you lick it; it electrifies your consciousness.” —Quote from Dana Gioia’s interview with David Perell on “How I Write” podcast
• “You are, in fact, a mash up of what you choose to let into your life.”—Austin Kleon
• “In a way, all of the books you have loved are mentor texts, if you are a writer.” —Meredith Davis

Note: Special thanks was given by Meredith Davis to the following Austin SCBWI writers, for their input on this talk: Kari Lavelle, Samantha M. Clark, Lindsey Lane and Lindsay Leslie