Welcome to Writing Idol

Writing Idol is a genre-fluid writing project created by Mark Woodward.

My first experiment is unfinished – an old manuscript, a notebook and the story of their discovery. At its heart is Mouseman, a book exploring male identity and the uncertain borderline where stories become memory. Think of it as serious comedy.

A new chapter of Mouseman is published every week on unfinished, along with occasional entries from the journal of the man who found it, and extracts from the author’s notebook.

As one agent said when rejecting it, the book may be too sordid to appeal to a mass audience. But if you don’t identify with the masses…

As well as writing fiction, I 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.

My 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.

Most of my writing aims to provoke laughter, or discomfort. Or both. Some of it is published on Substack, where it will always be free to read.