this itch of writing

This page is about my writing blog, This Itch of Writing. A couple of years ago it entered an exciting new phase of life, hosted on Substack. Click that link to go direct to This Itch of Writing on Substack, or click here to explore Substack more widely.

• Anyone who visits Substack can read the public Itch of Writing posts and access the archive of public posts, so help yourself!

• If you decide to become a subscriber, you can have public posts emailed directly to you as soon as they’re published.

• If you become a paying supporter you will, in addition

  • receive at least two extra posts a month exclusively for supporters,

  • browse the full Itch of Writing archive

  • be able join in with the community, including a weekly Ask Me Anything chat with me, and the power to start chats about writing whenever you like

  • get 5% off my one-to-one tutoring and mentoring

  • earn my undying gratitude for helping me to keep the Itch going and growing.

• If you become a super-supporter, you will, in addition, receive

• a free half-hour one-to-one Zoom with me to discuss whatever questions about writing would be most useful to you

• the exclusive Itch of Writing notebook, and some extra Itchy goodies

• even more of my undying gratitude

But if you’re a long-time reader of the Itch and its famous Tool-Kit don’t worry! There are still sixteen years’-worth of the original Itch posts fully accessible back on Typepad, although I won’t be posting any more new pieces there, and comments are now closed.

This Itch of Writing was born in 2007, in the days before social media when blogging was the only real way to carry on a conversation with readers. And since writing is the only thing that I think about every day of my waking life, I decided to blog about writing. Since then, the blog has established itself not just among individual writers, but also in writers’ forums, and professional and university creative writing courses all over the world. Most recently, with Substack, I’ve found a similar community growing, again, around blogging, but with all the speed, ease and interactivity that we’ve become used to on Facebook, Instagram and and the place formerly known as Twitter.

The title comes from John Donne, who complained in a letter to a friend that he had been waiting to have some news, as an excuse to write to him and thereby “scratch this itch of writing”; but as nothing newsworthy had happened, said Donne, he was going to write anyway. It’s a nod to the drive to write, which is also to communicate.