Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

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Backstory: How to Avoid Boring Your Readers to Death

February 03, 2026

Backstory is one of those things writers know they shouldn’t overdo and then immediately overdo anyway. We all start with good intentions. We tell ourselves we’ll sprinkle it in lightly. Just a hint here, a memory there. Next thing we know, we’ve written three pages explaining a character’s childhood trauma, their parents’ divorce, the summer they learned to hate boats, and the exact emotional significance of a chipped mug. And the reader? The reader has quietly left the room... The core problem with backstory isn’t that it exists. It’s that writers treat it like a moral obligation. As though the reader has paid for a full psychological report and will feel cheated if we don’t deliver. They won’t. Readers are not here for your character’s résumé. They are here for what’s happening now . Backstory is seasoning, not the meal. And like seasoning, a little improves everything – too much ruins it. The first rule of backstory is brutally simple: if it isn’t affecting the ...

When Silence Becomes the Enemy

February 02, 2026

There is a peculiar kind of dread that only appears when nothing is happening. Not when things are bad. Not when the news is terrible. Not even when the world is clearly going off the rails. Those moments, oddly enough, have shape. They have focus. They give the mind something to press against. But when the phone doesn’t ring... When the email doesn’t arrive... When the diagnosis is still “pending...” When the world seems to pause without explanation... That’s when the silence starts to hum. Most of us like to think we fear bad news. In reality, we often fear uncertainty more. Bad news hurts, but it also clarifies. It tells you where you stand. It gives you something solid to respond to. Silence does the opposite. Silence invites imagination, and imagination is rarely kind. In real life, this shows up everywhere. You’re waiting to hear back about a job. Every hour stretches. Every notification feels loaded. You replay the interview in your head, looking for clues that w...

Crying Wolf – Why Manufactured Drama Destroys Trust

January 31, 2026

There is a reason the phrase crying wolf has survived for centuries. It endures because it describes a deeply human flaw – the temptation to exaggerate, inflate, or invent urgency in order to be noticed, validated, or taken seriously. And it also endures because the consequences are always the same. Eventually, nobody listens. In real life, crying wolf looks like constant emotional alarms. Everything is a crisis. Every inconvenience is a catastrophe. Every disagreement is framed as betrayal. There is always smoke, but never fire – or rather, so much smoke that when the fire finally comes, no one sees it. In fiction, crying wolf takes a similar form. Endless twists with no weight. Perpetual danger without consequence. Characters screaming at full emotional volume from page one. High stakes declared, but never earned. The writer wants intensity, but substitutes escalation for meaning. And readers feel it instantly. The problem is not drama itself. Drama is essential. Conflict...

Outrage Is Not Power: Making Sense of a World on the Brink

January 30, 2026

We live in a strange moment in history where outrage feels like the background radiation of daily life. It hums constantly. It leaks through headlines, timelines, comment sections, and conversations that once might have been about weather, work, or books. Hate has become normalized not because most people are hateful, but because anger is louder than thought, faster than reflection, and easier to monetize than calm. What’s exhausting is not just the noise itself, but the growing sense that none of it changes anything. We watch leaders posture, blunder, threaten, and occasionally burn things down, and we’re told this is “politics,” as though recklessness were a natural law rather than a choice. For most people, the dominant feeling is impotence. We vote, we argue, we march, we shout into the void, and still the same personalities cycle through power, seemingly immune to consequence. That sense of powerlessness seeps into everyday life. It teaches people to disengage, to numb out,...

Writing Success Leaves Clues

January 29, 2026

The value of studying other authors is often misunderstood, especially by writers who fear that influence somehow dilutes originality. There’s a persistent myth that real writers should emerge fully formed, untouched by other voices, working in a vacuum of pure inspiration. It’s romantic nonsense. Writing has always been a conversation across time. Every author you admire learned how to write by reading other writers closely, consciously or not. The difference is that the best of them did it deliberately. When you study another author, you are not trying to become them. You are learning how the job is done. At its most basic level, reading other writers teaches you what is possible. Before you encounter a certain kind of book, you don’t even know that particular emotional or structural experience can exist. The first time you read a writer who makes something difficult look effortless, a door opens. You realize the form can stretch further than you thought. That realizati...

We Used To Think The Internet Should Be Free

January 28, 2026

There was a time when the internet felt like a promise. Not a product, not a funnel, not a marketplace disguised as a conversation, but a genuine phenomenon. A place where information wanted to be free, where curiosity was rewarded, where you could follow a trail of links for hours without being shaken down for your email address, your credit card, or your soul. People really did believe two things back in the early 2000s. First, that the internet would remain free, or at least mostly free. Second, that it might actually save us from ourselves. That sunlight would disinfect power. That knowledge would flatten hierarchies. That access would equal fairness. Fast-forward twenty or thirty years and it’s hard not to laugh, if only to stop yourself from swearing. The modern internet is not free. It’s toll-based. You can barely read a paragraph of news without slamming into a paywall. Articles are truncated just enough to annoy you into subscribing. Ads stalk you across platforms like...

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