The Writer: Ellen C Scott, author, journalist, editor

Stylist's digital editor, Ellen Scott, is also the author of Working on Purpose, writes a Substack under the same name and freelances as a journalist, editor and podcaster host. We talk writing life.

Ellen C Scott is a journalist, editor, podcaster and writer, currently working as the digital editor of Stylist magazine. She was previously the lifestyle and weekend editor at Metro, along with the co-creator and co-host of mental health podcast Mentally Yours. Her debut book, Working On Purpose, is now available to pre-order and will be published in August 2025. Ellen also writes short stories and is working on a novel. She lives in London with her partner and their cats, Babka and Panettone Soprano (featured below).

Here’s our interview…

Ellen, you’re a journalist, editor, podcaster, the author of a non-fiction book Working on Purpose and you write the Working on Purpose newsletter on Substack. Do you enjoy creating across genres, or is there one area you’d like to focus on more?

I love creating across multiple genres/platforms because any time I hit a mental block on one, I can pivot over to another. What I've learned over the last year, though, is that there is a limit to how much I can do. I challenged myself to submit the final draft of Working On Purpose and complete the draft of my first novel by January 2025, while also picking up extra responsibility at work as I was covering my boss's maternity leave. By the end of the year I'd done Working On Purpose and managed to do what I hope was a good job as acting digital content director at Stylist, but the novel made next to zero progress. I was really hard on myself about that until multiple people pointed out how unreasonable I was being. For now, I'm doing one full-time job and one book at a time.

You work in-house as Stylist’s digital editor. How do find it, balancing freelance work and employment?

I am terrified of being fully freelance because when I'm left to my own devices I can lose my mind a bit. The structure of a full-time, in-house job works best for me. I also really like that I can pivot between working solo and as part of a team with a bigger shared goal. At Stylist my brain can work in a very different way to how it needs to for writing fiction and non-fiction, and I thrive on that. I need the break from the very insular act of creating when I have no idea if what I'm doing is any good. At Stylist there's a team I can bounce ideas around with. There's also data I can use to see how I'm getting on. When I'm working alone, there's none of that. It can feel a bit like being lost at sea.

Babka and Panettone Soprano

What does your Monday-Friday routine look like, in working hours?

A typical working day starts at 6am, when I hang out with the cats (I have two, they are everything, and their names are Babka and Panettone Soprano), scroll social media, and then finally get up and get ready for the day. If I manage to do this early enough, I'll then spend an hour in the morning working on Working On Purpose; we're in the prepping for release stage so at the moment this is a lot of sending emails, creating promotional content, and writing the newsletter.

Twice a week I work in the Stylist office, so I'll leave at 8ish and cycle into central London. The other three days I'm working from home. Stylist starts at 9.30am and the second that time hits I really don't think about any of my non-Stylist work, because it helps me to keep it really separate. The next few hours are spent in Stylist world, so editing copy, writing the occasional article, analysing data, creating strategy, coming up with ideas for content, having lots of meetings, managing team members. There's always a lot to do and the day flies by. I try very hard to finish on time at 5.30pm and shut down my Stylist laptop, even if I'm planning to immediately open my personal work laptop two minutes later.

Do you work in the evening/on weekends - and how else might you spend ‘time off’?

I do. I'd love to be a morning writer but I've found I struggle early on. I can do more 'admin' tasks in the morning (creating posts for social media, sending emails, doing final edits and scheduling the Working On Purpose newsletter), but in terms of really creative writing my brain isn't working until 10ish... by which time I'm working for Stylist, so I need to get most of my personal writing done in the evenings and at the weekends.

I'll always plan to spend at least half a day writing at the weekend. I do have lots of downtime, though! I'm a big fan of timeblocking, and have a slightly neurotic routine of plotting out my entire week on a Sunday in half-hour blocks with colour-coding. Self-care, socialising, and relaxing, is 'blue', and I make sure that I have plenty of blue time dotted throughout the week. That might look like watching TV, playing with the cats, playing some Sims, going out for dinner with my partner, or seeing some friends.

What time of the day is best for writing?

Monday to Friday, definitely the evenings. At the weekends, afternoon to evening, especially if everyone leaves me alone and I have zero distractions.

Do you have a morning/night-time routine that helps with your writing?

Honestly, not really! And I'm not proud of that. I always envy people with proper routines and think I really should create one. The closest thing I have is that every single morning I make myself a matcha latte and try to drink it while doing nothing else. It was a recommendation from a time management coach I interviewed for a feature a couple of years back, Sarah Stewart. She said I needed a quiet, contemplative chunk of time. I've tagged matcha into that and it really does help to get me prepared for the day.

Also, and I know this is weird, I need to do my eyeliner before I can write. It's the only make-up I can really do so I've had a cat eye most days since I was 15. I think that moment of focus with liquid eyeliner is essential for getting me in the zone. I've had days where the words just aren't coming, then I realised I hadn't done my liner. I need it.

Babka

Where do you most like to write from?

I love to write from bed, from my home office area, on the sofa with TV in the background, or in a cafe. There's this cafe in east London called WAVE that is so great to write from.

Where do you find inspiration for your articles, newsletter, and non-fiction book(s)?

There's a lot of eavesdropping. And shamelessly mining people in my life for content. When I'm queuing for something I'll always listen in on conversations happening around me to see if there are topics or ideas that keep coming up.

Similarly, any time I'm cycling around London I'm people-watching on the way. That's often how I'll know that there's a trend we should be picking up on Stylist; if I see 10 women wearing green on the way to the office, a breakdown of the best green dresses is likely a good shout. When I spotted a bunch of Labubus on people's bags from my bike, that's when I knew the trend had crossed over from a TikTok niche to real life.

And the same goes for fiction. I wrote a short story last year that was inspired by a poster I'd seen someone pin up around east London. I have been told that story is 'horrifying', 'brilliant', and 'has stayed with me every time I've seen a dog ever since' by the few people I've let read it. I'm very grateful to whoever put up that poster.

I read a lot; books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters. Frequently an idea for a feature will come out of a tiny reference in one of those mediums. I'm also very online. I'm not proud of that, but it does help hugely with idea generation. The initial spark for the novel I'm working on came from a reality star's Instagram post.

You write and speak openly about living with OCD and depression, what drives you to share your mental health experiences in written form, and on podcasts?

My motivator for everything I do is to help make other people feel less weird and alone. That's what got me into features writing in the first place and it's what I'm proudest of achieving. When I've spoken and written about my mental illness, the reaction I get is incredible. I'll sometimes doubt whether my experience still needs to be shared - haven't people heard it enough? - and then every time I'm shown that no, people really do need to hear and read these stories.

After my recent Stylist cover story about depression, I received so many messages from people saying they had never read something that mirrored their own experience so clearly. I had an email from a woman in the US in her 80s who said that she was going to show her husband the article so he could finally understand how she's feeling. Someone came up to me in the office and said that reading my piece helped them understand their son better. I think that's incredible, and if being vulnerable can do that I'll keep opening up.

Have you created boundaries for yourself in terms of having subjects, or areas of life, that you won’t write about?

It's always a discussion (even with myself). I don't have hard rules but there will definitely be things that I don't touch. I also always want to be respectful of other people's boundaries. I wouldn't write something about my partner without checking in with him first, for example. But most things, I have no problem sharing. I've written about sex, going to a nudist retreat, my body, my dating experiences, my mental illness, the lot.

The only area where I am very boundaried is in respect to personal safety, on a semi-related note. There were some times previously when I went viral and received threats of violence (not just to me but also to my cat, which is where they cross the line!). I feel like the risk of people actually doing anything IRL is low, but I am still very conscious of not sharing my location and stuff like that. I won't tag a cafe I'm at until I've left it hours back, for example.

Do you feel successful, as a writer?

No, not at all! I don't know if I ever will. I have very high standards for myself and they're also all ageist and unfair. I really beat myself up for not having published a fiction book by the age of 30; I'm 32 now, so too late.

It's very rare that I think something I write is good (I'm struggling to think of a time when I have, actually). But I just keep pushing on. When I do receive positive feedback, I definitely feel like, OK, I'm doing alright.

How do you cope with failure?

With great difficulty. But also, with a lot of reflection. I'll really analyse and pick apart a failure and try to look at it objectively. What went wrong? Why did it go wrong? Often I have to fact-check my feelings about failure. Let's say I fail to hit a dream word count for that day. My depressed brain will automatically jump to 'that's because I'm terrible, a fraud, and should just give up'. My fact-checking process might instead go 'I was tired, I had a stressful day at work yesterday, and I obviously needed to rest'.

My New Year's resolution for the last few years has been to be gentler with myself. It's a long, deliberate process. On the flip side, I do think it's important to let yourself grieve a failure. Sometimes I just need to lie face down for an hour. And that's fine!

What’s next, for your writing?

First up is the promotion part of Working On Purpose, which is released in less than two months (!) on 21st August. Alongside that I'll continue to write and edit for Stylist; we've got a lot of really exciting pieces coming up. And now that the writing part of Working On Purpose is done, I'm excited to turn my secondary focus (ie. evenings and weekends) back to finishing the first draft of my novel. I'll also keep writing short stories because I love doing them so much. I really hope that by this time next year I've found a publisher for both the novel and my first collection of short stories.

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Links

Working On Purpose the book; Stylist; my other, less frequently updated newsletter, Guess I'll Die; My Instagram; The Working On Purpose Instagram, for anyone who enjoys a good meme about work

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