Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

  There is a particular confidence you feel when reading a novel written by someone who has actually lived inside the world they are describing. It is subtle at first. The dialogue sounds unforced. The procedures feel plausible. The small details land with quiet authority. You do not consciously say, “Ah, this writer must be a lawyer.” You simply relax. You trust the page. That trust is veracity. And veracity is gold. Writers are often told to “write what you know,” which is usually misunderstood as “only write autobiography.” That is not what it means. It means draw upon the layers of knowledge, obsession, professional insight, and niche fascinations you already carry. Those layers create texture. They create specificity. They create worlds that behave consistently because you understand how they function. Look at the number of successful novelists who came to fiction through profession rather than through pure literary ambition. John Grisham was a practicing attorney bef...

  There is something faintly surreal about the way we handle ancient religious texts in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, we have quantum computing, gene editing, interplanetary probes, and smartphones that can translate six languages before breakfast. On the other, we still have heated arguments about what a collection of Bronze Age shepherds thought about shellfish, fabrics, astronomy, or who is allowed to talk to whom on a Tuesday afternoon. At some point, you have to pause and say, gently but firmly, “Perhaps we are misfiling these documents.” Ancient religious texts are extraordinary artifacts. They are windows into the minds of civilizations that did not have microscopes, germ theory, or Google. They are poetic, symbolic, mythic attempts to understand a world that was vast, terrifying, and mysterious. Thunder meant something. Drought meant something. Disease meant something. The cosmos was personal, not mechanical. That is all fascinating, but can never be a lifes...

  In today's world, every few minutes, someone asks the same question with a slightly different tone of desperation. “What makes writing viral?” They ask it the way medieval villagers might have asked, “What makes rain?” As though somewhere, hidden behind a king's paywall or guarded by monks in a candlelit library, there exists a single sacred formula. One incantation. One structural secret. One magical headline that, if uttered correctly, causes the internet to bow down and chant your name. The uncomfortable truth is that viral writing is less like rain and more like weather systems colliding. It is emotional pressure, timing, audience psychology, cultural context, platform mechanics, and a pinch of luck swirling together until something sparks. And by the time you try to reverse-engineer it, the storm has already moved on. But that doesn’t mean we can’t study it. We absolutely can. We just have to approach it with realism instead of superstition. First, let’s define what...

  Series fiction is one of the most reliable roads to writing success because it turns the lonely act of writing a single book into something far more powerful - a relationship. A standalone novel is a one night conversation. A series is an ongoing friendship. It’s the difference between a reader saying, “That was good,” and a reader saying, “Where’s the next one, and why isn’t it already on my Kindle?” And here’s the practical truth that makes series fiction so attractive, especially for wannabe writers: it gives you multiple chances to win. If Book 1 is only “pretty good,” Book 2 can be better. If Book 1 doesn’t find its people, Book 3 might. If the series starts quietly, it can still build momentum over time. A single book has one chance to take off. A series is a flywheel. It also helps you, the writer, for a reason nobody talks about enough. When you write a series, you stop reinventing the wheel. You’re not building a whole new world from scratch every time. You’re returni...

I’ve been online long enough to remember when the internet felt like a room. Not a marketplace. Not a casino. Not a billboard jungle humming with invisible machinery. An actual - busy - room. Back in 2002, I’d post something - an article, a thought, a rant, a lesson - and within hours my inbox would begin to fill. Real names. Real questions. Real disagreements. Readers arguing with me. Readers thanking me. Readers sending me long, rambling life stories because something I wrote hit a nerve. I needed staff, not to analyze traffic - but to answer real human beings. Now I look at my stats and it feels… kinda abstract. One article spikes hits into the thousands. Another barely twitches. There's no obvious pattern. No steady correlation between effort and response. No predictable feedback loop so that I can focus on what people need or want... And the emails? These days mostly silence. Sales - yes. But conversation? Sparse. So I start wondering what many long-time o...