HeyJaredThis Itch of Writing with Emma Darwin
All about fiction and creative non-fiction: writing it, reading it, teaching it and occasionally hating it
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
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- Jul 24, 2026
Latest issues
The Queen’s Sister (opens the original)
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The new Book Post section celebrates books, from very old to very new, that I’ve enjoyed and hope writers will not only enjoy but find useful for their own writing. Click the link or the tab at the top of the home page to explore the growing list.THE QUEEN’S SISTER by Carol McGrathAs the publisher puts it:A mother, a wife, a woman of substance… At nineteen, Elizabeth Seymour is already a mother, has
The Contract and the Trust-Fall (opens the original)
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One of my grandmothers, a mathematician married to a physicist, never read fiction because it wasn’t true. You and I, too, know that even fiction which works with real historical events and people isn’t ‘true’ in the sense that a mathematical proposition is true - let alone any other kind of fiction. But we ignore that knowledge and read on because we’re seeking other kinds of truth, and different pleasures, and we’ve learnt that fiction can give us those.<a class="image-link image2 is-vie
Fifteen Things Which Say You’re Ready To Write Your Book (opens the original)
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It’s scary to actually sit down and put your first words of your first draft onto the page. I’m asked ‘How can I tell if I’m ready to start writing my book?’ almost as often as ‘How can I tell if my book is ready to send out?’. I often tell beginners not to panic about getting words down, because you can change every single one later if you need to. It’s true, of course - we’re not like painters in watercolour,
Why You Should Learn To Wrangle Long Sentences As Well As Short Ones (opens the original)
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The prevailing orthodoxy among many of my fellow writers - not to mention writing teachers and students - is that short sentences, specially with the simple syntax which they’re also likely to have, are ‘punchier’. They’re striking. Listen! They seem urgent and forceful. They demand to be heard. Readers notice them. Long sentences, on the other hand, go slowly, take too long, bog readers down, bore them - and we don’t want to be doing that, do we?Really? I think it’s nowhere near as simple as th
Thirteen Reasons You May Be Procrastinating (opens the original)
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A writer - from aspiring to multi-published - is someone who wants to write and so does write. And yet for many writers it’s a lifelong struggle to convert the want into the deed. For every writer who’s smugly certain that their procrastinating peers just lack backbone, there’s one who’s exhausted by the daily fight to get themselves to Get On With The Writing. This post starts with thinking about what kind of procrastinator you are - beca
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