Hired pen
It’s a new year and I’ve got a slate of new client offerings. If you’re working on a creative writing project and need professional feedback, mentorship, or one-on-one support to kick start revisions, I’m your pro. Full details and pricing are here, along with client endorsements. I’m currently booking for Winter and Spring 2024.
Experience
For the past several years, I’ve been helping clients with their fiction - and occasionally non-fiction - through a manuscript evaluation service. The author sends me their draft. I read, consider, then return detailed feedback. We have a couple of meetings and off they go to tackle a big revision. It’s great work, especially when writers report back on how much their books have evolved.
“Sharon Bala’s thoughtful reading, clear-eyed questions, and deep dedication to her role as a mentor transformed my novel into a truer, stronger version of itself.”
In 2020 I began mentoring through the Diaspora Dialogues Long Form Mentorship Program. Working with authors one-on-one, over the course of several months, watching their expertise grow, and their manuscripts improve in real time, has been an absolute privilege and one of the great joys of the past three years.
I’ve worked on literary fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, historical fiction, family sagas, short fiction, and memoir. Some writers I’ve worked with have been traditionally published (that’s industry jargon for not self-published). Some have signed with agents. An author I mentored in 2020 recently published her debut.
Expertise
I figured out how to do this work by practicing with my author friends. You get adept at diagnosing the problems in a story when you’re routinely parsing the works-in-progress of experienced talents. And you quickly learn the art of gentleness when someone else takes a scalpel to your manuscript. Mainly I’ve absorbed these skills by studying the master - my editor Anita Chong, whose preferred punctuation is the question mark. Recently, a writer I was mentoring congratulated my Socratic Method. Who do you think taught me that?
“[Sharon’s] feedback about arc, character and voice was invaluable to my manuscript and helped me work through sticky spots that weren’t working at a crucial point in my revision process, between an early draft and the draft I ended up submitting to land a publisher.”
Philosophy
I believe in guidelines, not rules, that asking questions is infinitely more useful than prescribing answers. This is art, not science, and there’s no single formula to describe all narratives. There are many traditions of storytelling and I’m the expert in precisely none of them.
However, I do know a few things about the tools of craft and how to wield them. And I’m adept at ferreting out that interesting, buried, storyline. Yeah. That one. The complicated, dishy thing you didn’t mean to write, perhaps don’t want to write, but maybe need to write? I don’t know. Just a suggestion.
Always, always, I aim to empower writers. It’s your book. You’re in the driver’s seat and know what’s best. My role is to guide, to help you find your way through the maze you’ve created to the story at the centre only you know how to tell.
If you’ve hit the wall on your manuscript, are struggling with revisions, or seeking a mentor, get in touch. It would be my pleasure to help.
“Sharon’s thoughts on character development, story arc, pace and plot were critical, nurturing and insightful. Her in-depth notes helped me craft a more complete and contained story world for my characters. If you need another set of eyes to guide your work in a positive direction, look no further than Sharon Bala.”
