Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

Dear Fellow Writer,  Would you like to start making money writing and selling short stories? And SOON? If so, I’m inviting you to join my new Video Lecture Course, which launches in the next couple of weeks. It’s called “The Easy Way to Write Short Stories That Sell” – and is an information and feature packed writing resource like no other! If you want EARLY ACCESS, enter your email here, right now: SIGN UP   In this special course – my first ever VIDEO Lecture Series - offered exclusively through Udemy - I’ll be covering: ·         How to come up with original ideas instantly ·         How to plot a story in less than ten minutes ·         How to write a short story in an hour ·         How to sell short stories to the marketplace ·         How to make money from s...

During some recent Easy Way to Write chat sessions I've been banging on about building novel templates assuming everyone knows what I’m talking about! I sometimes forget that not everyone has read  The Easy Way to Write a Novel That Sells. Seriously, for the benefit of those who want to know how to construct simple plans for their novels, here's a simplified version of what's in the book. First, know your characters inside out, work through a rough story outline either in your head or on paper, making sure it's your characters that define the story and not the other way round. Okay, so that's the tough bit. Now for the easy bit. Get a piece of paper and write 1 to 10 down the left hand side with plenty of space for writing in between. Next to No 1, write Intro. Next to No 10, write Finale At No 1, write one sentence, no more, describing your opening scene. At No 10, write one sentence describing the last scene in your book. For instance, if you were wri...

You probably won't be surprised to learn I read a lot of unpublished manuscripts.  I also read a lot of published work. Are there some glaring differences between the two?  You betcha. The fact is most beginning writers write too much.  That's okay for the first draft but when it comes to editing, you need to give that Delete Key a thorough work out! Good writing is about pacing, about taking the reader on a journey and keeping in step with them along the way. If you get the pacing wrong, the reader will stumble and begin to lose interest because it will seem you are more interested in writing words than telling a story. Here are some tips on how to cut down on unnecessary verbiage! The Art of Description With the advent of global communication and the visual media, we all know what most things and even most places look like.  It's no longer necessary to spend more than a couple of sentences establishing what things are, w...

Writing short pieces - say up to around 5000 words - is fairly straightforward.  You can, in most cases, just start writing and keep going until you've said everything you wanted and then go back and edit for sense. If you've missed something out, you can slot it into the text.  Or, if you've overdone a section - or the writing is bad or unnecessary - you have good friend in the delete button. Writing longer pieces is different. Having a lot to say will take time and effort - the two things a writer cannot afford to waste. So what's the best way to approach writing longer works? It's all about preparation.  It's about knowing where you're going and having some idea of your destination. Some writers say they can't write using a plan - or even knowing what the ending is.  They cite Stephen King - who says he doesn't know the endings of his stories when he starts out.  It's deliberate, he says, because he...