This article almost didn’t happen. The initial brief was simple: write a story about an issue affecting young people. My mind swam with ideas—the housing market, climate change, an acquaintance of mine who recently joined a cult. Yet every time I sat down to write, I couldn’t. I would sit and stare, then despair, and … Continue reading Like Drawing Blood: Writing in 2019
Pagan Malcolm has always dreamed of becoming an author – she began writing when she was just five years old, and even handwrote and illustrated a twenty-page story in year four, convinced that it would be her debut. ‘[It] was a blatant rip off of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ she admits in retrospect. But … Continue reading Why marketing is essential to your writing career: With Pagan Malcolm
A writer friend who’d begun teaching her craft at a university once advised me that, with my experience, I could teach ‘editing’, pronouncing this word as if naming Milo Yiannopoulos. Because that’s a subject close to my heart (editing, not Yiannopoulos), I was miffed at her acid tone. But typically, my response came to me … Continue reading Shakespeare had some help: editing and the myth of the solitary genius writer
Social media is a small numbers game: 280-character tweets, 15-second Instagram stories, 10-second snapchats. Generally speaking, if you were looking for 7,000-word longform, feminist fiction – social media is not the place to find it. Well, that was until a simple story about bad sex and imaginary cats surfaced the web last year. Published … Continue reading Millennial Feminist Writing in #MeToo Literature
