Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

Writing is a vocation.  You may have to keep reminding yourself of this. Especially when you want everything - money, writing projects, publishing success - to go faster.  I read a guy's blog this week where he talked about burn-out. He was so determined to get a novel finished he wrote 16 hours a day for about three weeks. He said that suddenly he couldn't make out the words on the screen. He was looking at a foreign language and he realized his brain had shut down.  The experience frightened him so much that he stopped writing and suffered a long period - over six months - of angst over what had happened. For a long time he was too afraid to start writing again for fear that his mind would play this trick on him again. Luckily that's not happened to me yet. Sounds awful. The worst thing that happened one year was that I got one of those humps on my right wrist - apparently they're caused by hitting the keyboard too hard for too long. It took a few ...

  Recently, one of my esteemed students wrote me a letter - yes, an actual piece of paper with handwriting on it - gasp! She thanked me for one of my courses that she was working through at home. She said she liked my 'metaphysical' approach to writing because it helped her move out of a block she'd been having. I've never really thought about my instruction being 'metaphysical' to be honest. It's not meant to be. A better term might be 'holistic', in that I see writing and the writer as equally in need of guidance and advice. The writer, to me, is inseparable from the writing. You can't be a good, honest and effective writer if you don't aspire to be a good, honest and effective person. If that's metaphysical, then so be it! But you don't have to be perfect. In the same way as your writing doesn't have to be perfect. What's perfection anyway but an intellectual tool we use as a benchmark? Perfection is relative...