Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

According to the latest figures, the sale of digital books is increasing by around 300% a year - while the sales of real books - hardbacks and paperbacks - is dropping by around 15% a year. You'll notice that I didn't call them e-books - mainly because I know many writers have a knee jerk reaction to the word and just close down - and say, that's not for me and dismiss the whole idea of being published in anything other than paper form. Fact is, the publishers you aspire to impress are beginning to feel the pinch because they too have had the same 'jerk' reaction to digital content.  Unless a movie star buys the rights to a book, like what happened with The Martian! But generally, trad pubs really don't know what to do about the e-book... Trouble is, the new players in publishing like Amazon and Apple - and the thousands of digital publishers already on line - know exactly what to do about it! Do you remember about ten years ago people were s...

Dear Fellow Writer, Watched Scream 4 the other day. I love the Scream movies for that deliberate self consciousness of the genre they use as part of the plot. It's a clever device - a kind of nudge nudge, wink wink at the audience. Instead of: "this is not a movie, it's real life" - Scream goes beyond to: "this really is a movie, about movie cliche, and we both know - and love - it!" Anyway, in between Ghost-face's customary chasing and slashing, the movie explores the role of the Net in our daily lives, pointing out that, in a sense, our generation lives in public. Social networking sites allow us to document the things we do - or want to be seen to be doing, anyway. Reality shows give us the impression everything we do is somehow interesting and noteworthy. But as the killer points out in the final scenes, when everybody is famous, what have you got to do to stand out? And what price do you pay for trying? ...

It seems grammar is an issue for many of us writers. (BTW, I think ' we writers' sounds dumb - and is probably incorrect these days. See below.) Grammar rules often seem to be some kind of closely guarded secret. They must be - because new writers often ignore them or act as though they're irrelevant! Many readers still like good grammar from writers. So, here's a round up of the most common writing mistakes I've noticed recently. Its/it’s Confusing I saw this in a newspaper just the other day. It's is short for 'it is' - and there's no apostrophe needed for its other possessive uses. Formatting Foibles Fiction still needs to be formatted like fiction - with indented paragraphs and definitely no line break between every paragraph. Manuscripts looking like non fiction e-books are roundly loathed by traditional publishers, editors and agents. Comma Clogging Some people use too many commas, some not enough. They...

Humans don't consider something to exist until it has a name. Or at least some kind of descriptor. Words bring things to life. Emotions, experiences and activities become concrete when they're explored and documented. More than this: reality is essentially defined by words. In the same way that – at the quantum level of things - perhaps even within the entire universe – matter is said not to exist until it is observed. This is great for writers. Invention makes us mini gods, co-creating the world around us by recording it. For whatever reason: our own pleasure or from a need to share or communicate. Because that's the great part: words take on much more solidity when they are shared. Mere words become concepts, art forms, even entire other worlds. In fiction, an author's view of reality can take on concrete substance and to some of us, actually become more real than the world around us. Personally, I’m more attached to some fictional chara...