Welcome to Writing Idol

Writing Idol is a genre-fluid writing project created by Mark Woodward. We make fiction exploring masculinity, identity and the uncertain borderline where stories become memory. We call it serious comedy.

Our first experiment is unfinished – an old manuscript, a notebook and the journal of the man who found them.

A young man mutilates himself. A young woman investigates.

If you like mystery with teeth, and can stomach a pile of mouse bodies…

We also publish fragments from our work in progress – a novel about how boys become men, and what happens to the ones who don’t make it.

What he fears, he must control. What he can’t control, he kills. Welcome to the world of MM.

As well as writing fiction, we create prose-poems and song lyrics. They include narratives of twisted love, meditations on life and death, and the shit-kicking country song of a man anticipating life in a persistent vegetative state.

Our short stories include a folk-tale possibly written by the sisters Grimm, and longer stories about a gay tortoise, a disintegrating businessman and a boy whose ear-fixation leads him into local politics.

We publish something new every week that might provoke laughter, or discomfort. Or both. Most of it we publish on Substack, and though some things may be reserved for subscribers, our work will always be free to read.