Bea Sage - Second Place, Magicfest 2026

We interviewed the Magicfest Second Place Overall winner, Bea Sage!

WW: What encouraged you to participate in Magicfest?

BS: I’m a Writer’s Games diehard, so the Fests feel like a natural addendum - having said that, the last time I participated in one (Leapfest), I didn’t manage to submit anything for one Event and ended up with a very hastily completed 500-word story for another, so I also wanted to redeem myself on the Fest side of things!

WW: What were you worried or nervous about in the beginning?

BS: I really wasn’t sure I would be able to submit something for all three Events with this being a weekday competition, but I managed it this time. Other than that, this was one of those times where I really hadn’t written any original short stories for months, so there’s always a faint anxiety coming in that the last decade of writing experience might have abandoned me and I suddenly no longer know how to plot anything. I maintain that it’s not an entirely unfounded fear, but I’ll admit it’s yet to come true.

WW: How did life's challenges affect your writing?

BS: I know I was definitely not the only one for whom the weekday-ness was challenging - I’m a medical student, and was on placements that started at 7:00am and sometimes went until 4 or 5pm. The Fest definitely resulted in some unwisely late nights, especially the Thursday night before submission (for my time zone, Events ended at 10am Friday). 

WW: Which Event did you have the most fun with?

BS: I actually think Event 2, Arcane Ledger - the story I ended up writing for that involved amended versions of two characters who’ve been bouncing around my head in some form or another for years and years without ever being written down, and I had a lot of fun actually developing their voices. I always love a dialogue Core Concept, too!

WW: Which Event was more challenging for you?

BS: The final one, Surviving Alone, hit a few rough spots for me - the last Event is always the hardest, I find, even if it’s only three weeks. More than that, though, the Event prompt itself aligned very closely to the kind of story I tend to write, and for some reason that always makes me freeze up! I don’t know whether it’s the feeling that this is going to end up as a story I’ve written a thousand times before, or if it’s the pressure of thinking that I should be able to do well at it, but the more a prompt aligns with my natural writing instincts the harder I find it to brainstorm. That may have been one of the reasons I ended up doing this story in first person and with a protagonist who’s kind of a jerk, both things that are very unusual for me!

WW: What inspires you?

BS: Very occasionally, a prompt will make a plot idea to pop into my head fully formed, and from then on it’s less inspiration and more nutting out details and logic. More often… I get a lot of inspiration from whatever I’ve been reading or watching recently, and often active brainstorming for me will look like trying to figure out one specific element that made me enjoy something I’ve just read, and how to twist the prompt around that element. My Surviving Alone story definitely had some Project Hail Mary inspiration, for instance. Sometimes it’s just looking around at whatever I’ve been doing in life and trying to draw elements from that; long walks or train rides while listening to music are also definitely a central tenet.

All of those kind of came together in my first event story, actually. I had just read a story that involved keeping photos of a loved one in a wallet (before they were in a romantic relationship), and while that didn’t actually end up making it into the final story, it led me down a path of ‘what if you’re exes, but you still have their photo in your wallet’ to ‘well, obviously that means they have to discover it’ to ‘why would you be back in contact with them’, which was where the real-life aspect came in - as stated, I’m a medical student, so… well, I won’t betray too much. But let’s just say that element of it is something I’ve always wanted to use as a romance plot device. And all of this coalesced in my head while walking to and from a train station, listening to music!

WW: What advice would you give to writers?

Ignore most advice. By which I mean, nothing is absolute, and sometimes you just have to be able to do something well before you can do it ‘wrong’. There’s so much out there on, like, ‘don’t use adverbs!’, ‘don’t write eye dialect!’, ‘never write interrupted sentences!’ ‘plots have to follow three-act structures!’, etc etc - most of it is well-meaning, some of it’s even somewhat valid, but none of it is true, and none of it should be internalised too hard. I really do think the only valid writing advice is a) read a lot b) write a lot and c) preferably, find someone who is as good as or better than you at writing and/or reading, and ask them to give you advice that is actually specific to you and your stories. For instance, it took me a good few years to start using paragraph breaks properly, and run-on sentences and paragraphs are still my instinct outside of fiction writing - in case you couldn’t tell from these answers.

But having said that. 

Sometimes, interrupted sentences and run-on sentences are valid. 

They said, cheekily.

Responses are published as received.

---

About Bea Sage:

Bea Sage is actually three writers stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat. Together, they have stories in publications including Red Penguin’s A Heart Full of Love and Kapow!, TL;DR Press’s Breathless, Zoetic Press’s NonBinary Review, online at Defenestration and Bullshit Lit, and have placed in the Writer’s Workout ‘Writer’s Games’ for five consecutive years. One or the other of them can usually be found ignoring the advice of the other two in order to buy more books and/or mugs and/or sweaters.