Intro

I’ve always had a soft spot for mentor characters—I don’t know why. Maybe I like that experience-born confidence that they so often have, or seeing the relationships between them and their protégés. Maybe I just like them because they’re already cool and accomplished by the time the story starts, so they can work that sniveling protagonist into shape. Whatever the reason, the mentor in a story is often the first character that super catches my attention.

So, naturally, when I write my own stories, I like to include mentor characters in them too. Which, of course, means that I have to ask myself what exactly makes a good mentor character. Obviously, there’s no one-size-fits-all here, but I do have a few basic things that I try to keep in mind whenever I’m writing them—which are the things that I’m going to be sharing with you in today’s post.

So let’s get to it!

Creating a Mentor Character

As you can probably guess, you should treat your mentor character like you would any other character. They need a backstory, a personality, and a physical appearance. I’m not going into go into details on all this in this post (or else it would be obnoxiously long) but, if you want to see how I do these things, feel free to check out my How I Create My Characters post (for the backstory stuff, mostly), How I Come Up with Character Personalities post, and How I Design My Characters post.

What I am going to talk about in this post is what I typically keep in mind when I’m doing all this for a mentor, specifically. Because, if they’re supposed to be guiding the protagonist, there are some requirements that have to be met.

Starting with the most obvious thing, the mentor has to possess the skills that the apprentice needs to learn in order to reach their goal. When I’m coming up with the mentor’s backstory, I like to figure out how the mentor learned those skills themself, even if it isn’t necessarily going to be all that important to the story. Chances are, the mentor had their own mentor who taught them what they know, like how Obi-Wan was trained by Qui-Gon before he went on to mentor Anakin in Star Wars. Or maybe the mentor had to learn their skills largely on their own, like Haymitch in The Hunger Games, who then passed his knowledge on to Katniss. Whether they had a teacher or were self-taught is entirely up to you; it just depends on what you want the rest of their backstory to be like and if you think it would’ve been possible for them to learn their skills on their own or not.

Another thing that I like to do when I’m coming up with mentor characters—though this one is by no means a requirement—is try to give them a personality that I think would mix with the protagonist’s in a fun way. Chances are, the mentor and protagonist are going to share a lot of interactions in the story, so I like to do what I can to make those interactions entertaining. So maybe they have contrasting personalities, or just some traits that could interact in interesting ways. If you want to see more about this sort of thing, I talk about it at length in my How I Write Partners post.

Lastly, I also like to consider the mentor’s age. Typically, the mentor will be considerably older than the protagonist, passing their knowledge on to the next generation, but this doesn’t always have to be the case. Like, if you’re writing a sci-fi story about a 60-year-old retired space marine who’s decided he wants to settle down on a nice space farm, he could easily have a 30-year-old neighbor who’s more experienced at farming than him and could be showing him the ropes, technically making her his mentor. So, while the mentor is usually older than the protagonist, don’t think that there can be no exceptions.

Mentor-Apprentice Relationships

Another important thing that I consider when I’m writing a mentor character is what their relationship with their apprentice is like. Do they come to be friends over the course of their time together? Maybe even start thinking of each other like family? Or are they more distant, their relationship purely one of necessity? It could be that they don’t even like each other, but have to tolerate each other in order to achieve their goals. Maybe their relationship goes from one end of the spectrum to another as the story progresses.

Obviously, whatever decisions I make here are going to determine what all of their interactions are going to be like, so it’s important to figure this out. A lot of the time, I kind of know what I want before I even start fleshing out the characters. But, if I don’t, I usually turn to the mentor-apprentice relationships in books and movies that I like for inspiration. Maybe I want their relationship to be a little like Peter Parker and Tony Stark’s in Spider-Man: Homecoming, where Peter (the apprentice) kind of idolizes Tony (the mentor). Or maybe I want them to be a little like Wulfgar and Drizzt Do’Urden in The Crystal Shard, where they become super close friends and get into all sorts of mischief together. Or, better yet, maybe my mentor-apprentice relationship is kind of a mix of the two, with some other random ideas I have thrown in there to help make it unique.

Basically, their relationship can be anything I want it to be. I just pick whatever sounds the most fun to write or what I think would work the best for the story.

Make Them More than Just the Mentor

While it’s not always necessary—particularly if they aren’t going to be a very major character—it can give the mentor way more depth if you acknowledge, even in some small way, that they have a life beyond just guiding their apprentice. Maybe they have aspirations that have nothing to do with their protége, or they have their own inner demons to fight. Maybe they have a family to provide for, or a hobby that they love. Anything like this can make them much more interesting and realistic.

These things could be as relevant or irrelevant to the story as I want them to be. Most of the time, I do actually end up making the mentor’s more personal stuff fairly important to the story because, just like when I’m reading or watching something, the mentor often winds up being one of my favorite characters in whatever I’m writing, so I like having more stuff about them in there. But that’s by no means a requirement; it depends on the story and how important you want the mentor character to be.

Regardless of how important they are, though, this is also something that could add to the drama if I plan to kill the mentor off later. (This has traditionally been the fate of most mentor characters, sadly, so I thought I should mention it.) By giving them something like aspirations that they never got to achieve or a family that they’ll never get to return to, you can make their death all the more tragic and impactful. So you know, there’s a nice tip for if you want to make readers—and potentially yourself—cry.

Outro

That’s all for today’s post. I hope you found this helpful and/or interesting! If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check back next month for my next writing post. Until then, thanks for reading!