Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

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...