We creative types like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, wresting our work and what success we can find out of an unforgiving world by the strength of our sinews and the pureness of our hearts, when the truth is, as Isaac Newton said it, we are ‘standing on the shoulders of giants.’ That is, with the help of people who have done what we’ve done and provided help and examples for us to further ourselves. Nearly everyone I know who’s accomplished anything has done it with the help of mentors.

For writers especially, I would say that many of our mentors might not be people we’ve known or worked with directly. Often we are moved to writing by trying to emulate something we read that spoke to us in a deeper way than if we were only a reader. In that case, the mentor becomes partly the person who wrote the work and partly the work itself.

My first mentor of that kind is John D. MacDonald, about whom I’ve written before. I remember walking into a panel at Bouchercon in New Orleans and seeing two of the presenters wearing T-shirts that read Bastard Sons of Travis McGee. I knew I was in good company. I never met the man, though the fact that I write about amateur sleuth types in political situations owes a great deal to him, that and the knowledge that popular fiction can treat serious issues.

In graduate school, I met Thomas Williams, Jr., a National Book Award-winning novelist who taught at the University of New Hampshire.

Tom was in no way a writer of crime fiction—the UNH program was widely considered to have too many people writing literary fiction about trees. What I learned from him had to do with working more deeply into a piece after you were sure it was done, the self-discipline of not settling for good enough. And he wrote what I think is one of the finest short stories written by an American, Goose Pond.

A mentor doesn’t always present as such. In the year Williams was sick with the cancer that killed him, Joe Monninger stepped in to teach the various workshops and courses Tom would have been responsible for. He and I were about the same age, though he’d had much more success. I had gone to graduate school not for the degree but to see how I measured up against other writers and he might have been the first writer to treat me as a professional peer. He died recently and wrote a lovely tribute to his place in Maine and dying there.

What I mean to say here is that we need to appreciate our teachers and mentors while we can. There are things I said to both Tom and Joe in appreciation, but there is always more to be grateful for. We worry about talking to readers to sell our books, asking for reviews, increasing our reach and our community. What we sometimes forget is that our community began with those mentors. Don’t wait to appreciate them.