Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

    An author friend messaged me earlier this week. Apparently he’d been lying awake at night thinking about my advice. I recently tried to convince him that planning his novel was a good way to get him out of a block. He’d contacted me to say he wasn’t sure that planning stories worked for him, actually for any writer. He thought perhaps “making stuff up as you went along” was better. Hmm… Indeed, he went further, suggesting that if a writer did something right, like accidentally write a good book, then they were likely to be more surprised than anyone. Clearly he’d been obsessing far too much over this whole issue. In the end he let me know he was of the opinion that most writers really didn’t know what they were doing and that if they did by chance create something wonderful, it was a probably a total fluke. To be honest I think this attitude is pretty dumb. Sad actually. And wrong. My experience tells me it’s clear many authors know exactly what they’re doing from start to finish.

    “I had no idea we were surrounded by so many birds until I started looking out the window.” My photographer wife said this to me the other day and I immediately thought, there’s an article, or a life lesson, in there somewhere.   Opportunities can be around us all of the time but we don’t see them because we weren’t specifically looking for them. I once spoke to a New York publisher who said the world didn’t need more self-help books. Clearly the sentiment is not true but I do understand it is harder to get them published these days, unless you’re a doctor, psychologist, or a celebrity. And even then… I hear that Arnold Schwarzenegger is having trouble promoting his latest self-help book because he’s old school. He believes in self-determination, making something of yourself. This astonishing guy worked his ass off to get what he got. From bodybuilding to learning English to schmoozing with Hollywood producers and politicians. Arnie’s whole life is an advert for successful self-he

I’m not sure whether you have the same scenario in your country but around here - South Australia - they’re desperately trying to get people to use self-checkouts in supermarkets. Clearly a bid to save money by not having to employ staff to help their customers through a checkout. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of resistance to this idea. In fact Woolworths claim that around three-quarters of people express their irritation at self-service checkouts by stealing a couple of items each time they use them. Woolies estimate they’re losing, depending on the store’s location, between 7% to 20% of their revenue because of this mild form of protest. Apparently there’s a phenomenon known as “psychological reactivity” which is when you try to enforce rules that people don’t like, the effort makes them break the law on purpose, just to show their disapproval. Like the way a baby will refuse to eat broccoli. Or a teenager will react against a curfew. Or a billionaire will resist paying taxes. Write