Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

How Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde Reveal a Subtle yet Brilliant Anti-Establishment Mind There’s a certain delight in realizing that Robert Louis Stevenson, that supposed spinner of boyish yarns and penny-dreadful shocks, was in fact one of the most subversive moral thinkers of the Victorian age. His stories masquerade as adventure and horror, all the while operating as sly critiques of the very establishment that adored him. If you scratch the bright varnish on Treasure Island , or peer closely at the psycho-moral shadows of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , you begin to see that Stevenson wasn’t simply entertaining the Empire. He was examining it. Questioning it. Needling it. Quietly rebelling against it. To understand the depth of that rebellion, we must start with the world Stevenson inhabited. He came of age in the latter half of the 19th century, during the height of British imperialism. Nelson’s legacy still perfumed the national imagination – the brave admiral wh...

There is a curious anxiety floating through the writing world these days – the idea that AI might one day “eat itself,” endlessly recycling its own output until everything becomes a blur of warmed-over ideas. It’s an interesting image, a sort of digital Ouroboros. But it’s also based on a misunderstanding of how AI learns, improves, and interacts with the creative universe. The truth is simpler, more reassuring, and far more empowering for writers everywhere: AI is only as good as the human creativity it consumes. It depends on us. It thrives because we thrive. And in that curious, symbiotic relationship, writers have more opportunities than ever before to sharpen their craft, deepen their understanding, and accelerate their creative breakthroughs. When used thoughtfully, AI does not replace the writer – it becomes an extension of the writing mind, a tool for thinking, imagining, experimenting, organizing, and refining. Far from “eating itself,” modern AI is constantly being fed by t...

  Every story worth remembering has something under the skin – a pulse, a whisper, a quiet ache that stays long after the last page is turned. It’s not the plot twists, clever dialogue, or the shock ending that make a story endure. Those are ornaments. What lasts is meaning – the emotional truth that lingers in a reader’s heart long after the book is closed. The Deeper Current Beneath the Plot When you sit down to write, it’s easy to focus on mechanics: who does what, where the conflict lies, how to keep readers turning pages. That’s the scaffolding of storytelling. But beneath every scene, something else should be happening – something that connects the events on the page to the emotional lives of your characters, and by extension, your reader. This is the deeper current, the “why” that runs beneath the “what.” It’s the emotional resonance that makes an ordinary story feel important. Think of it as the heartbeat that turns ink into life. A mystery novel might explore truth and...