Recently, Jasmine told me that my coaching was one of her most meaningful experiences in 2020. This obviously made me happy, not least because I felt the same way about working with her. Jasmine sort of radicalized me.
Before we worked together, I felt like writing coaching was a fun thing I could do for a side income. It suits my skills and temperament much better than copywriting, which is what I'd been doing, often badly. However, after working with Jasmine, I started feeling like I almost have a moral obligation to do this job. I realized just how positive-sum this game can be.
That might make it sound like I exerted a herculean effort. But that's not the case. Working with Jasmine actually required distressingly little of me.
Here's how it went. I'd never spoken to Jasmine. She knew me from Twitter. After a DM, we had an intro call, during which she expressed doubt about whether she had anything to say, or whether her life experiences were interesting. After hearing some of her life experiences, I disagreed with her assessment, and suggested she write a short story. She went away and did it, and came back with something cool and compact. After reading it a few times, I felt that it started to get really interesting at the end, so I gave her another assignment: grab that last thread and pull hard and see what happens.
About two months later, she had most of a brilliant first novel. I hope you get to read it. It's not like anything else I've encountered exactly, because Jasmine is an original stylist. But, if pressed, I'd say that it's a little like Murakami and Philip K. Dick, both in style and in level of quality. I know that kind of sounds hyperbolic. But I was stunned. Her work was good by any reasonable standard, and it was unacceptably good coming from a 22-year-old. When I read a couple of paragraphs, chosen at random, to my wife, I looked up and her jaw was hanging open. "You have to keep working with her," she said.
This, to me, suggests a couple of things.
First, our societal mechanisms for finding and nurturing promising writers are terrible. It's a bad thing that Jasmine's fate fell into the hands of some random guy on Twitter. And, okay, it's not like I think she wouldn't have written anything if I didn't come along. She's an ambitious person, and her mind wouldn't have left her alone. But I did accelerate the process; you may have years more of Jasmine's work because we happened to exchange a few messages.
Is the climate especially bad right now? I don't know. My sloppy hypothesis is yes: as legacy media shrinks, there are fewer slots in fancy magazines, and thus, those opportunities will fall more often to expert young literary socializers in New York or London, who aren't, like, dumb, or anything, but who don't necessarily represent the totality of human experience. Consequentially, high-level mentorship goes to a narrower population. But maybe that's wrong. Nevertheless: if Jasmine wasn't pushed earlier, the pushing machine needs new batteries.
Second, there's a lot that you can get through one-on-one education that just isn't available through group teaching. And one of those things is: permission. Someone looking you in the eyes and saying, you're not different than those people you admire. They've just hit the keyboard a few more times than you. Trust me: you're of interest, and you should behave accordingly.
And this was the only real thing I did for Jasmine, I think. Sometimes it takes a lot to unblock somebody, and that's my job, and I get great results, and I love it. But with Jasmine, I just said go and she took off like a rocket.
Saying this feels a little weird. In some ways, I don't have any right to give Jasmine permission. My impression is that she's more talented than I am. But, okay, she likes my stuff, and I have a book out, so I'm an Official Author, or whatever. I'm happy that I got the job, though I feel unqualified.
But here's the rub: in our historical moment, one-on-one education is deemphasized. It's all about the curriculum, the average, the group. For most students, there isn't a significant portion of the day when you sit down with a mentor. Unless you're lucky, you don't have an adult outside your family whose job it is to know your mind, and who could, in light of that knowledge, say, Hey, Maybe You Should Do This.
This is awful. Someone should figure out how to fix it. Group education is great, but individual mentorship is a huge missing piece. Until it's fixed, I'll keep patching up what I can with my little service business, which may one day grow. Stay tuned for further updates, and pay attention to Jasmine Wang. She's terrifying.
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