Write to Change the World #1

Hi, this is the first in a shortish, time-limited series about How To Write. It’s a follow-up to the course of that name, which I created for The Idler Academy.

I’m calling the series Write To Change The World (WTCTW) because the subject of “how to write” is vast, and needs to be contained somehow.

So I’m containing it by looking back ten years to the summer when I wrote How To Change The World (Macmillan/The School of Life). I’ll be sharing how I went about it, and what I might do differently if I were to write it now.

To begin, a little scene-setting…

It was 2011, a summer of riots in London, where I live, which were followed by the charming #riotcleanup movement, in which tens of thousands of Londoners used social media (and that hashtag in particular) to co-ordinate street cleaning.

Here are some of them, in Camden:

Back then, the mayor of London was Boris Johnson. Now, he’s prime minister. When Johnson visited Clapham just after the riots, he was greeted by cries of “Boris, where’s your broom?” Yesterday, in parliament, he received essentially the same message — though without the light-hearted…