Welcome to This Itch of Writing…
…and thank you for dropping by. This Itch of Writing has just celebrated its first birthday here on Substack, but it’s actually eighteen years old!
I’m Emma Darwin, author of the novels The Mathematics of Love, and A Secret Alchemy. Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction does what it says on the tin, and my creative non-fiction This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin is a writer’s journey through my family tree. My new novel will be published by Holland House Books in September 2025.
I’m also a teacher and mentor of creative writing, and although I believe passionately that all anyone needs to write well is the desire to work at it, plenty of paper and pens, and access to a good, big library, I do myself have both an MPhil and a PhD in Creative Writing. For more about me and my work, click through to my website.
Since 2007 I’ve been blogging at This Itch of Writing: thinking aloud and exploring how writing fiction, creative non-fiction, and sometimes scholarly and academic non-fiction, works for real writers with real lives. With its renowned Tool Kit, the Itch is read and linked to by writers, authors, agents, editors, websites, and university and industry creative writing courses around the world.
But despite all this, I’ve always had to fit it into the gaps in my working, writing, earning life. Now Substack has given me the chance to develop and grow the Itch more than ever before, by making it possible for writers who find it helpful, or simply interesting, to subscribe and support it more directly.
Why Subscribe to This Itch of Writing?
When you subscribe you’ll get a free blog/newsletter every fortnight: you can have it delivered direct to your inbox, read it here on my Substack site, or both. The newsletter will include a new Itch of Writing piece about some aspect of writing or reading (explore the archive to get a feel for that) and sometimes news about events of my own or other writers’ lives.
You will also be able to see my notes: quick thoughts, links and comments about all the things that Itch subscribers and I are interested in. Quite often they will be digging an old Itch piece out from deep in the archive, which you and I had both forgotten but which I hope you’ll find interesting.
If you’d like more, you can become a supporter or a super-supporter of the Itch. In return for a small subscription, you will at least two extra posts a month, as well as giving you the option to comment on posts and join in with supporter-only chats.
Super-supporters - ‘founding members’ in Substack-speak - also have an annual one-to-one meeting with me to talk about any aspect of their writing life, as well as a signed copy of one of my books, and a few extra goodies.
Some More about This Itch of Writing
The philosophy of The Itch - such as there is one! - is that there is no one kind of good writing, there is no one way to write well, and there there are as many reason for taking your writing seriously (at least some of the time) as there are writers.
Whether it’s about process, product or punctuation, the Itch doesn’t like Don’ts - not least because as soon as someone tells me a Don’t I can always think of a situation in which it could be the perfect Do. Creative work is too multifarious, too contingent, just plain too messy, for any single way of doing things to be enough.
In other words, on the Itch there are no rules, there are only tools - though we might also think about guidelines and rules-of-thumb. But absolutely, definitely, no rules, nor any shoulds, musts or oughts.
My job is to help you explore those tools and guidelines, and discover ways to chose the best for you to use, on this project. On another day, with another project, you might choose to take a completely different approach - and I’d like to think that the Itch would have some ideas to help on that later day too.
I’m also hoping to grow the Itch of Writing Community here, because I know how much I’ve learnt from other writers, and also how much most of us need the support of our fellows. Who else knows what an encouraging rejection is, what to do when an inciting incident turns out to be a climax, and why semi-colons really matter?
I'm very proud of This Itch of Writing, and of the writers it's helped towards better writing, a happier writing life and even publishing and self-publishing contracts. And the Itch has turned out to help me as much as it helps others: almost everything I say to students and mentees is something I first had to figure out in order to blog about it.
So I do hope you’ll subscribe, to join me in this new stage of the life of This Itch of Writing. And meanwhile, happy writing!
Emma
