A couple of days ago I passed some advice about the craft along to an aspiring sportswriter. For six months now, I’ve been mentoring the young man, who is thoughtful, studious and lives in suburban San Diego. His name is Jarred, and he’s someone eager to stand on the summit of sports journalism, driven to get there might be a more accurate way of putting it.

Talk to Jarred for a minute or two and you’ll  discover right away that he has no time for the slow-cooker approach to advancing in the craft.

So when I sent him these writing tips, I told Jarred they had come from Mike Sager, a nonfiction writer whose work I admire. Sager has won more honors for his stylish prose than three people can count. When a man like him talks about writing, anybody who is serious about nonfiction should listen.

And Jarred — he’s the sports editor of his college newspaper — was willing to listen. He took the tips, which he printed from Sager’s website, taped them on his bedroom wall and then shot Sager an e-mail. It read in part:

“I have been doing this for the last two years, and I want to make the jump to writing long form feature stories,” Jarred wrote in his e-mail to Sager. “The only problem is that I have never done anything of that nature nor has anyone on my staff (it’s a student-run newspaper). Is there anything that you can tell me that will help?”

Reaching out to a stranger, a famous one at that, can be an invitation to rejection, a lesson also in how to handle disappointment. For disappointment never is easy to stomach, no matter how old you are. When he wrote the e-mail to Sager, my young friend did not know what to expect … probably silence, I’m guessing.

But Jarred got a speedy reply, though its content was not what he could have thought he’d get.  Here’s Sager’s reply:

“Good for you, my man.

“You feel like driving down to Pacific Beach and visiting me in my office? I’m basically around if not taking my son to a basketball game or practice or some such.”

The suggestion caught Jarred off-guard. He didn’t see an invitation like this one coming his way – not an invitation from a nonfiction writer whose national reputation might hint he’s too busy to counsel a writer who’s trying to learn the craft.

Yet Sager’s kindness is a reminder of how willing the literary community is to stretch out its hands and pull another aspiring writer into its fold. Writers do so for no other reason than writing is about sharing, which is a lesson we all should heed.

For somewhere along the way, each of us has met a writer or an editor whose hands grabbed ours and held tightly.  Maybe we have taken that writer or that editor for granted, perhaps not appreciating what he (or she) did as much as we should have.

I have a hunch Jarred, the young man I mentor, will appreciate it. He wrote  Sager a reply, trying to set up their meeting before this famous writer changed his mind. The latter is likely to happen, because no man offers to help unless he means it.

Ask, and you never know what you might receive. Besides, what do you have to lose?

Jarred might well answer:  ”Nothing.”