Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

  Every writer, sooner or later, bumps into the same unsettling question. If the world so often seems to reward cruelty, manipulation, and lies, what is the point of telling the truth? It is a fair question. A dangerous one, too. Because the moment writers begin to doubt that truth matters, that justice has weight, that integrity has consequence, the ground beneath storytelling begins to crumble. Not just fiction, but history, journalism, memoir, even the quiet act of writing a letter that says what really happened. This is a plea from writers to writers. And perhaps, through us, to the world. Wrong can win. But only briefly. Right, slow and battered and often unfashionable, always wins in the end. Not because the universe is sentimental. But because truth has endurance. Wrong relies on concealment. Right relies on exposure. And concealment has a shelf life. You can see it everywhere if you know where to look. Power built on lies always needs more lies to hold it upright. ...

How Shakespeare Wrote About Power Without Losing His Head, and Why Writers Still Have To Do The Same Every generation eventually asks the same question of its writers: why aren’t you saying more? And every generation of writers quietly asks a more dangerous one in return: how much can I say without losing everything? This tension is not new. It did not begin with social media, public shaming, or institutional gatekeeping. William Shakespeare lived inside it. He wrote during a period when words could quite literally cost you your freedom or your life. The Elizabethan state did not cancel writers on Twitter. It imprisoned them. It shut down theatres. It interrogated. It punished. And yet Shakespeare wrote relentlessly about power, corruption, tyranny, legitimacy, injustice, and lies. He just didn’t do it head-on. Shakespeare Knew the Limits of Direct Speech Elizabethan England was not a place for blunt political commentary. The monarch ruled by divine right. Questioning authority ...

  Point of View Is Where the Camera Sits Writers often confuse point of view and voice because they feel intertwined when you’re in the flow. You’re writing. The character is thinking. The sentences are doing their thing. It all seems like one big magical soup. But point of view and voice are not the same tool. They’re partners, yes, but they do different jobs. When you separate them in your mind, you suddenly gain control. You stop guessing why a chapter feels “off,” and you can diagnose it like a professional. Point of view is the technical choice . It’s the camera angle. It answers the question: Who is perceiving this moment? First person, second person, close third, omniscient, plural “we,” rotating perspectives. It’s basically the lens through which information is delivered. Percival Everett’s novel James is a clean example of point of view doing a big, obvious job. It retells Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim - James - rather than Huck. That isn’t just a st...

After spending serious time inside the work of H G Wells – his fiction, his nonfiction, his arguments, his blind spots, and his warnings – a clear picture begins to form. Wells was never trying to predict the future in the way people lazily credit him for. He wasn’t a prophet. He wasn’t playing guessing games with technology or science. He was trying to wake people up in the present. Once you grasp that, everything about Wells shifts. How you read him changes. And more importantly, how you write after him changes too. The first thing you come to understand is that Wells was never interested in comfort. He distrusted easy optimism. He distrusted technological triumphalism. And he deeply distrusted the reassuring idea that progress naturally makes people wiser, kinder, or fairer. Again and again, across novel after novel, he returned to the same unsettling truth – intelligence without responsibility is dangerous, and systems built without moral growth eventually turn against the peopl...

  Every serious examination of Conan Doyle eventually has to confront the uncomfortable, fascinating, and frankly wacky truth. The man who gave the world Sherlock Holmes – the supreme apostle of reason, evidence, and rational deduction – ended his life convinced that fairies had been photographed in an English garden, and that the dead were speaking to the living through séances, mediums, and spirit guides. This is not a footnote. It is not a quirky aside. And it is certainly not an embarrassment to be quietly brushed under the carpet by literary critics who would rather keep Doyle neat and respectable. It is central to understanding who Doyle was, what drove him, and why Sherlock Holmes ultimately became a burden rather than a triumph. To understand Doyle properly, we have to follow him to the places where logic failed him – and where grief stepped in to fill the gap. The Seeds Were Always There The popular myth is that Conan Doyle suddenly “lost his mind” late in life. ...

  Welcome to a journey unlike any other you will take as a writer. You are stepping into the flickering candlelight of Edgar Allan Poe’s imagination – a place where shadows breathe, reason trembles, and language becomes a darkly shining instrument of terror, beauty, and revelation. This course is your invitation to walk alongside one of literature’s most enduring and influential architects, a man whose work has shaped horror, mystery, psychological fiction, science fiction, poetry, and even the modern detective story. As you move through the lessons, you will discover not only how Poe wrote, but why he wrote the way he did – the obsessions, the technique, the precision, and the burning need for emotional impact that drove every story, poem, and essay he crafted. This is not a dry academic tour of a long-dead author. It is a living exploration of what made Poe’s writing so powerful that it still grips readers nearly two ce...

  Long before podcasts, Netflix documentaries, and global streaming platforms made true crime a permanent fixture of modern culture, the genre was born in the clatter and ink-stains of the daily newspaper. True crime did not begin as a carefully curated narrative art form. It began as sensational press reportage , shaped by deadlines, circulation wars, and the public’s deep, uneasy fascination with violence, mystery, and moral transgression. The dirty secret of the genre is this - true crime did not originate as a literary tradition. It originated as news business . And nowhere is that more visible than in the fog-choked streets of Victorian London in 1888. Jack the Ripper and the Birth of Mass-Market True Crime Jack the Ripper is not just history’s most infamous unidentified serial killer. He is also the moment when true crime, as a public obsession, truly ignited at scale. Before the Ripper, crime reporting existed, of course. Murders, trials, and executions had long b...