How To Hold Your Mentor Back WITHOUT Killing Them

Mentors in stories are quite frequently killed off to keep them from being too useful to the hero, so often that it's become almost a joke. I mean, have you seen the number of memes about this?? There was literally a place in the Lego Ninjago Movie called the Bridge of Falling Mentors. That's how far this has gone.

Of course, I, a meme enthusiast, have made a meme about this, so here's one:

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A post shared by Bethany Meyer (@scribbledfiction) on Dec 30, 2019 at 6:38am PST

News flash! The mentor doesn't have to die. I wrote a similar post on this ages ago, which you can check out here if you like, but today we're not talking as much about why the mentor doesn't have to die so much as what we can do instead.

We talked about the mentor character earlier this month in Outlining Characters 101: How to Outline the Mentor, and as promised, here is the list of ways to keep your mentor from being too useful.

There's a major problem with the mentor that no one ever talks about: what's stopping them from becoming the hero themselves?

True, the mentor being too useful and fixing problems that the protagonist should be fixing by himself, but what's stopping the mentor from just doing all those things? What's stopping your mentor from becoming the hero that the protagonist is supposed to be?

That's the major problem with the mentor, and the reason most people kill their mentors. But the killing can be avoided if you just go with one of the following.

Instead of killing the mentor, consider holding them back by doing one of these:

• The mentor doesn't have the ability to do the things the hero can. The ability the mentor lacks could be a number of things. Maybe the mentor is old and thus too weak in his body to do the job of a hero. Maybe he suffers from some kind of disability that holds him back. Or maybe the fact is simply that the protagonist has magic and the mentor has none.
  
  
• The mentor doesn't want to be the hero. Some mentors, like Maui from Moana, just don't want to be a hero, they just want to be left alone. The hero may have talked them into helping out, but they want as little to do with the actual hero work as possible, so they can't do any spotlight-stealing here.
  
  
• The mentor's day is past. In The Giver, the Giver has already been a Receiver of Knowledge and has had this knowledge his whole life. He's done his time, and now it's over. He's passing the role on to Jonas, who will become the story's new hero.
  
  
• The mentor has a falling-out with the protagonist. The show Merlin did this time and time again. Repeatedly Merlin and the dragon(who is a mentor although technically Gaius is a more mentor-ly character) argued over their differences in morality and went their separate ways, but the dragon was never fully estranged. To me, the producers refusing to totally cut the dragon out of the picture is one of the great missed opportunities of the show.
  
  
• The mentor is off on his own journey. Our example for this one is The Hobbit. Gandalf is technically part of our group and is very useful, but at almost every moment we need him, Gandalf is off on his own separate adventure. This keeps him from becoming too useful. Granted, Gandalf gets the company out of many nasty situations in a way we could call a cop-out, but as I love The Hobbit, so I shall forgive them.
  
  
• No one can know the mentor is helping the protagonist. I don't have an example for this one, but I wish I did because I love this idea. In this scenario, the mentor is someone who can't be caught helping the hero. If the mentor is someone from enemy lines sneaking out to train the hero, or the things he's teaching the hero are illegal where our characters live, it's probably for the better that no one knows about it.
  
  
• As a reverse of the above, the mentor betrays the hero. This will keep the mentor from being too useful, won't it? Not to mention, if the mentor has taught the hero everything he knows, he will know exactly what the hero's weaknesses are and how to take him down.

The whole point here is to avoid the need to kill the mentor by giving him some other kind of barrier. Something has to keep the mentor from becoming a hero themselves. One could always go with the 'chosen one' thing, but please don't. That trope has long since worn out its welcome, and I would really like to see some alternatives.

While we're talking about mentors, can I be real honest for a second? I haven't written in a mentor character in a long time. The narratives I've been writing just haven't had space for one. But now that I'm writing all these posts on mentors, I'm really missing it. My urge to write a new story is rising. Quick, someone remind me that I'm in the middle of writing a three-book series!

Who's your favorite fictional mentor? Have you ever written a mentor character? Let's talk down in the comments!