Journalism

My writing career started – and nearly ended – when one of my article pitches was appropriated (i.e. nicked wholesale) by a rather large magazine.

So I knew I was onto something.

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Perseverance paid off, and I wrote for a huge number of publications, big and small.

These included Big Cheese, a music magazine, covering the whole gamut from features to reviews to interviews – the latter of which included Bad Religion, Sepultura, and Jason Newstead from Metallica.
 

I had a lot of fun with my column in The London Paper. Because revenue was driven largely by text message replies, the more inflammatory the topic, the better. So I lambasted Borough Market; I got the pitchforks out for Croydon; I poured scorn on estate agents. I shamelessly harvested low-hanging fruit and did my level best to push the capital’s blood pressure through the roof.
 

Less contentious was my work for Empire, the fabled and respected film magazine. Well, I say that, but… when I wrote a beginner’s guide to black magic to support one of the Harry Potter films, it didn’t half pull in the complaints. Which I found baffling; it’s not as if you can walk into your local branch of WHSmith and find a copy of the Abramelin ritual nestling in the shelves (unless of course you have, in which case you can).
 

And because of my previous IT connections, it was inevitable that I’d end up writing on that topic – Internet Monthly and ComputerActive, to be precise. The latter was an interesting challenge: condensing relatively complex topics into practical and short articles that could be digested and understood by its target demographic of older readers.
 

In fact – that probably helped me develop one of the key skills for any copywriter: make it elegant, make it clever, but above all, make it simple.