In creative writing courses and in literary publishing situations, authors contribute to the writing of their colleagues, as editors, supervisors or ‘mentors’. Literary works in progress are thus critically discussed and reviewed within an ongoing dialogue. The literary text is at the centre of this setting, in which the writing scene is not reserved to the author alone, but opened by the presence of another and can thus be considered as a ‘mentoring scene’. The article analyses the dialogues of four ‘mentoring duos’, evaluating their impact on the writing processes. It considers this specific writing scene as potentially performative, whereby the text acts as the script of the dialogue and finally considers the specific interaction between text, author, mentor/supervisor as a ‘feedback series’.