Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

Writing is a long term vocation. You may have to keep reminding yourself of this. Especially when you want everything - money, writing projects, publishing success - to go faster. Do you ever feel like this? I do. 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. It too...

It's hard enough to actually get the words on paper - but after that you have to do the self promotion thing. That's when you find out that, rather than the world clamoring to read you work, you're just one of thousands upon tens of thousands of writers in exactly the same place. Writing a book used to be the goal - that many splendorous achievement that marked you out as special. Now? Join the queue. Getting publishers interested in your book is - and always was I guess - a total uphill struggle. But it's getting worse. The whole publishing industry seems set up to say 'no', before you've even had time to pitch your idea, hone your proposal or edit down your synopsis. Publishers explain they already have a huge back catalogue of work they have yet to publish, that, really, they don't need to see your manuscript, even before they know what it's about. But then you read that traditional publishing is on the way out anyway. Kindle i...