Madeleine Chapman talks with Eleanor Black about leaving her writing job to paint a garage
People were shocked when you announced on Twitter that you were leaving The Spinoff. So why did you leave?
I was at The Spinoff for just over four years. I went in as an intern and [thought] I would do some boring admin work and eventually be able to write; and then eventually be a staff writer. This sounded like a 10-year plan [but] all the things I had dreamed of doing over the course of a couple of decades I had done in four years and I didn't really know what to do with myself. I wanted to see my name on the front of a book. When I got to write a book [Steven Adams: My Life, My Fight], funnily enough my name wasn't on the cover but I had only been working as a writer for six months when I signed that contract. Now I have another book coming out and, when I finished the second book, I thought, "Do I just keep doing this in a four-year cycle for the rest of my life?" I loved the work so much I realised if I didn't take a break now it was very possible I would happily stay where I was for another 10 or 15 years. Given how much happened in the past four years, I thought I should open myself up to doing whole new things in the next four.
What do you want to do?
People kind of laughed when I said I was going to paint my parents' garage - and actually they are behind schedule, so I'm going to have to help build it as well - but I didn't want to be a writer when I was younger, I wanted to be a teacher. I studied education and I did renovation work. I have painted a lot of houses and have done a lot of building assisting, so this is not new for me. I enjoy doing it because you don't have to think about it too much, you just put on some music and off you go. I want to reset and not have to think about anything until I can organically figure out what next. I will still be writing things. I wrote for the School Journal last year and I quite enjoyed the process. Politics is a newly fascinating area for me - there is a lot of writing that goes on in the background for MPs and that sort of thing. People might think I have retired at 25 from being a writer but really there are so many ways of using writing skills in a completely different way from journalism or book writing.
