Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

So - we made it to the end of the year.  I hope last year was all that you wanted - and needed - from your present life. We often think that the new year is a time to recycle all those old resolutions.  I think this can be a mistake.  Because we then send a message to our brains that goals and ambitions are to be confined to January - and forgotten when the year gets under way! The time to make resolutions is every day.  Just five minutes in the morning - say at nine o clock - spent making a short list of the things that are important to you - bearing in mind the long term, as well as the short, will pay huge dividends when it comes to reviewing your progress towards your dream life. Year's end is really only a time to ask: Am I living my dream life?  And if not, what can I do to make that happen by the end of next year? Usually any kind of success these days implies self promotion... Writers are often expected to self-promote, either thr...

It seems the longer time goes on, the more traditional publishers are shutting their doors to new authors.  Writers I speak to are getting their manuscripts back sooner and more frequently with those customary rejections these days, even if they've had publishing deals in the past. Anyhoo, where I live, South Australia has more than its fair share of successful writers - Sean Williams, who writes Star Wars novels, for one.  DM Cornish, whose Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy has a Hollywood option.  My wife, Robyn Opie, is the author of 85 internationally published books.  Janeen Brian is the proud author of 75 picture books, the list goes on. Wannabe professional writers should find this encouraging. Of course a lot more writers find success online these days, being independent and carving a niche as an authorpreneur. My subscribers often complain about how long it takes to gain some traction as an independent author. But don't forget it's never be...

  Many writers swear by critique groups. They rely on them for good solid feedback from a wide variety of other writers - because it's helpful, confidential and, best of all, it's free. But many new writers join critique groups for the wrong reason. Actually, it's not so much wrong - and it's common enough - but it does hamper what you might get out of judgment by your peers. Namely, newbie writers usually only want one thing, and that is: validation. It can come as a great shock to new writers to venture out into the world - to finally summon up the courage to show their work to other writers - only to discover that they are not universally and immediately acknowledged as a genius. I have seen this phenomenon over and again. New writers come down to our own crit groups and read their material. You can tell they most times only want one response - to be told that their work is brilliant! Any other gentle criticism from group members can result in a ...

I hope you're well and happy and that your writing is going well. Most of you will know by now that I send out a free newsletter every week - usually on Fridays. But I'm not sure everyone will know why. Fact is, I have a dream... I've always known I wanted to write. I actually started writing before I could read properly. I've kept a diary of my private - and not so private - thoughts since I was around five years old. I don't know why, but it always seemed logical and somehow important to record my insights in written form. I guess that's how most writers start out. Later, I wrote plays, short stories, movie scripts, even novels as projects that had to be fit around the rest of my life, working to pay the rent in whichever place I found myself. Mostly London, UK, as it turned out - where I submitted manuscripts and played music to earn a crust for almost two decades. Over that time, I read as many books about writing as I could find. I took cours...

The more you write, the more you realize how hard it is to get anyone to take any notice of you. Newbies often worry that their words are going to have some awful and monumental impact on people - way out of proportion to reality. First time novelists often email me in varying states of panic, asking if it's okay to say this or that. Others are so afraid of putting their name to their own writing, they want to invent pseudonyms - usually just before publication! In case their own words come back to bite them somehow. In today's world, it's hard to even get noticed, let alone raise a stir in people enough to provoke a response. There's about billion new words appearing on the Internet every day. In the real world, probably a billion again appearing in new books, newspapers and magazines. Writers everywhere are trying to read and to be heard, to be taken seriously. And yet, a celebrity's kiss will always be more compelling news. You've got to see ...

Writers are a stubborn lot. Sometimes it can take us decades to learn a subtle truth about writing that forever changes us - and our writing - for the better. At various stages in my writing career, more experienced writers and critics have said (in no particular order) "watch your point of view switches," "careful not to use the author's voice," "learn format and punctuation assiduously," "don't over justify your concepts," "don't overuse adjectives or qualifiers," "dump cliche and adverbs," "be totally honest in your writing," "know your characters inside out," "make your motivations believable," "write for the reader," etc., etc. Each time I felt an inner resistance and fallen back on the age-old feeling of "I know what I'm doing - that's my style." Only to realize, sometimes years later, that my peers and critics were right - and that I shoul...

Being a fan of Charlie Kaufman's early screenplays - Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - I sat down last night to watch the film he recently wrote and directed, Synodoche, New York. I had high expectations I guess - perhaps too high. I had assumed that Kaufman's quirkiness came from a need to be original. Alas, the film betrayed his true fascination - in a line from the movie, he even says, "I realize now that nobody's interested in my misery." And why should they be? Kaufman's universe is a bleak one. Our lives are seedy and pointless and become all the more complex, or rather painfully complicated, as we strive to examine and make sense of them. There's no joy in Synodoche, only angst, regret and loneliness. No love, only misunderstanding, lack of connection and fear - and the ever present specter of death. The only line I found uplifting in an otherwise dire waste of screen time was: "There are no ...

A lot of people ask me how I manage to get so much done. I often wonder myself. I was lucky. When I'd done schooling, I decided I didn't want to work for a living. Of course I had to - for a while. I did some pretty horrible jobs, gravitating from factory to office work because I noticed that the office workers seemed to get an easier time of things - and got paid more. Of course I could have done the life journey properly and got a nice cushy career type job in a bank or a corporate company. It's not as if I wasn't bright enough. I was even offered a few positions like that. But, much to the chagrin of my mother, I chose not to take them - mainly because it seemed like a cop out. The easy option. I deliberately chose the hard way - because I wanted to loathe the 9 to 5 I suppose. I'd watched my Dad living a life of quiet desperation for twenty years and I believed there had to be a better way to exist. Actually, I guess that's a kind of adolescent way...

As if I'm not busy enough already, a local director has asked me to write the music for his latest production - and have it to him by the 11th of October. So on top of the two pitches for TV series we're producing, running Magellan Books and the EWTW and editing my latest novel during the day, I'm composing and recording music in the evenings... No Rest for the Wicked, as I once sang! BTW, as well as Lydie M Denier, I'm proud to announce another Hollywood star has chosen Magellan Books to launch her latest book to coincide with her new TV series in October. Cool, or what? More news on that soon - coming to an inbox near you! Anyway... I'm probably one of the last people in the world to read "What the BLEEP Do We Know?" By now most of the ideas in it are well publicized and known thanks to movies like The Secret and the media blitz that accompanied it a few years back. A lot of self help gurus are still peddling the Law of Attraction or their version of it ...

Writers have a tendency to complicate things. We think that's what is required of us. Character depth, we tell ourselves, is what counts. Plot complexity, we think, is what impresses. Layers of story threads woven into a sophisticated tapestry will mark us out as a literary master, we want to believe. But actually in the modern marketplace I don't think this is true. At least not when it comes to selling our work to agents and publishers, producers, indeed the general public. Just look at the way books, TV and films are pitched to us - in the media especially. You might think that it's journalists and editors that create these little snippets and brief synopses designed to encapsulate our work. Wrong. It's us - we have to do it. Novelists write their own back-blurbs. TV listings are derived from the screenwriter's original log lines... Even after we've written something as word-weighty as a novel, we have to learn how to distill dow...

I've always been loath to tackle the subject of writer's block. A personal, largely superstitious thing - but still I get asked what writers should do about it - all the time! So here goes: 1. Crisis, What Crisis? First off, you need to deny that there is any such thing as writer's block. This debilitating condition can only hurt you when you give it the privilege of a concrete name. Take away its name and you begin to take away its power over you. Tell yourself, there is no such thing as writer's block. There is writing and not-writing. Only writers have a name for something they're NOT doing. Think about the absurdity of builder's block, or doctor's block, or pilot's block. Any kind of inability to write is similarly absurd. Writing is like breathing - something you learned to do a long time ago without thinking. Stop thinking about it - and just do it. 2. Stop! In the Name of Love. If you've run out of ideas or you're st...

"Getting paid for writing, son, is a triumph of tenacity over intelligence." I love this quote - it's one of my favorites - not least because it's one of my mother's. Mommie Dearest has always regarded writers - and me especially - as odd sorts.  The idea that we would spend a large portion of our day knocking out words has always struck her as, in her word, silly . A waste of time, basically, and not the sort of occupation for a sane person.  She may be right but that doesn't stop it from being a compulsion for me - and most other writers I know. I remember once when she came to visit me - which only happens about once a decade.  I was at a particular low point. Can't remember why. I think I'd just lost my way after a deal fell through. One of those times, you know? It was with great glee and insistence that she leaped on my misfortune and told me the situation was a God-given sign that I should give up all this arty stuff and s...

I lost a day this week. Yesterday I was under the impression it was Wednesday (it's Friday today). Robyn (the lovely wife) had to battle to right me of this misconception last night until I eventually had to accept I'd lost a whole twenty four hours. I'm not sure how this happened. I have my writing week so carefully mapped out these days. I worked on my new course last weekend and all day Monday - perhaps a little of Tuesday. No problem. I spent a day somewhere in the week editing my latest novel again - after Robyn had done an edit/proof run through. She'd made notes on where she thought I needed to tighten up a couple of logic inconsistencies. Fixed those, hopefully. Oh yeah, I spent around half a day sending out hard-copy editions of my books - which sold out - had to contact the printer and get some more done because I'd run out. Plus of course I spent many hours answering the constant stream of emails that go with having a high profile Net ...