LET US TELL YOU A STORY
From 10,000 words to Coffee Break Tales, some famous writers started out with us…
From its very first issue, My Weekly has been rightly famous for its fiction. Our Edwardian sisters loved romance, drama and suspense just as much as we do, and stories and serials were a welcome escape from the humdrum reality of everyday life. Heroines came from all walks of life, and then, as now, stories had strong feminine interest and positive outcomes, making them a joy to read. You had to be keen, though – stories could reach 10,000 words, for which the authors were paid the princely sum of £20, and serials stretched to 12 or 15 parts. We’ve had some famous writers in My Weekly over the years – Pulitzer prizewinner Pearl S Buck and poet Sylvia Plath were writing exclusive stories for us in the 1960s – a tradition which continues today, with writers like Sue Moorcroft and Glenda Young honing their skills on the pages of My Weekly before going on to become best-selling novelists.
Picture Perfect
It’s always been important to us to complement our stories with strong g illustrations from excellent artists. Styles have changed over the years s, from simple pen and ink sketches to o full colour illustrations rich in detail l, to conceptual artwork – a mixture o of styles that is reflected in today’s story and serial illustrations.
Family F Drama At Its Best!
W ho remembers our two long-running series? In LifeAnd Th he Wadhams, Mike and Polly Wadham and their expanding fa mily graced our pages from 1961 to 1989. Their weekly ad dventures made us laugh and sometimes cry as we fo llowed their progress from newlyweds to grandparents-toe, be and you can still read their adventures online in our new se eries, Life And The Wadhams: The Next Generation. The orriginal series was replaced by MillgateCourt which co oncentrated on a community of neighbours in a renovated de evelopment, and ran for more than 10 years. The idea wa asn’t wholly new – UnderTheseRoofs, written in the 19 930s, was our very first neighbourhood series!