Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

  Many writers swear by critique groups. They rely on them for good solid feedback from a wide variety of other writers - because it's helpful, confidential and, best of all, it's free. But many new writers join critique groups for the wrong reason. Actually, it's not so much wrong - and it's common enough - but it does hamper what you might get out of judgment by your peers. Namely, newbie writers usually only want one thing, and that is: validation. It can come as a great shock to new writers to venture out into the world - to finally summon up the courage to show their work to other writers - only to discover that they are not universally and immediately acknowledged as a genius. I have seen this phenomenon over and again. New writers come down to our own crit groups and read their material. You can tell they most times only want one response - to be told that their work is brilliant! Any other gentle criticism from group members can result in a ...

I hope you're well and happy and that your writing is going well. Most of you will know by now that I send out a free newsletter every week - usually on Fridays. But I'm not sure everyone will know why. Fact is, I have a dream... I've always known I wanted to write. I actually started writing before I could read properly. I've kept a diary of my private - and not so private - thoughts since I was around five years old. I don't know why, but it always seemed logical and somehow important to record my insights in written form. I guess that's how most writers start out. Later, I wrote plays, short stories, movie scripts, even novels as projects that had to be fit around the rest of my life, working to pay the rent in whichever place I found myself. Mostly London, UK, as it turned out - where I submitted manuscripts and played music to earn a crust for almost two decades. Over that time, I read as many books about writing as I could find. I took cours...

The more you write, the more you realize how hard it is to get anyone to take any notice of you. Newbies often worry that their words are going to have some awful and monumental impact on people - way out of proportion to reality. First time novelists often email me in varying states of panic, asking if it's okay to say this or that. Others are so afraid of putting their name to their own writing, they want to invent pseudonyms - usually just before publication! In case their own words come back to bite them somehow. In today's world, it's hard to even get noticed, let alone raise a stir in people enough to provoke a response. There's about billion new words appearing on the Internet every day. In the real world, probably a billion again appearing in new books, newspapers and magazines. Writers everywhere are trying to read and to be heard, to be taken seriously. And yet, a celebrity's kiss will always be more compelling news. You've got to see ...

Writers are a stubborn lot. Sometimes it can take us decades to learn a subtle truth about writing that forever changes us - and our writing - for the better. At various stages in my writing career, more experienced writers and critics have said (in no particular order) "watch your point of view switches," "careful not to use the author's voice," "learn format and punctuation assiduously," "don't over justify your concepts," "don't overuse adjectives or qualifiers," "dump cliche and adverbs," "be totally honest in your writing," "know your characters inside out," "make your motivations believable," "write for the reader," etc., etc. Each time I felt an inner resistance and fallen back on the age-old feeling of "I know what I'm doing - that's my style." Only to realize, sometimes years later, that my peers and critics were right - and that I shoul...

Being a fan of Charlie Kaufman's early screenplays - Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - I sat down last night to watch the film he recently wrote and directed, Synodoche, New York. I had high expectations I guess - perhaps too high. I had assumed that Kaufman's quirkiness came from a need to be original. Alas, the film betrayed his true fascination - in a line from the movie, he even says, "I realize now that nobody's interested in my misery." And why should they be? Kaufman's universe is a bleak one. Our lives are seedy and pointless and become all the more complex, or rather painfully complicated, as we strive to examine and make sense of them. There's no joy in Synodoche, only angst, regret and loneliness. No love, only misunderstanding, lack of connection and fear - and the ever present specter of death. The only line I found uplifting in an otherwise dire waste of screen time was: "There are no ...

A lot of people ask me how I manage to get so much done. I often wonder myself. I was lucky. When I'd done schooling, I decided I didn't want to work for a living. Of course I had to - for a while. I did some pretty horrible jobs, gravitating from factory to office work because I noticed that the office workers seemed to get an easier time of things - and got paid more. Of course I could have done the life journey properly and got a nice cushy career type job in a bank or a corporate company. It's not as if I wasn't bright enough. I was even offered a few positions like that. But, much to the chagrin of my mother, I chose not to take them - mainly because it seemed like a cop out. The easy option. I deliberately chose the hard way - because I wanted to loathe the 9 to 5 I suppose. I'd watched my Dad living a life of quiet desperation for twenty years and I believed there had to be a better way to exist. Actually, I guess that's a kind of adolescent way...

As if I'm not busy enough already, a local director has asked me to write the music for his latest production - and have it to him by the 11th of October. So on top of the two pitches for TV series we're producing, running Magellan Books and the EWTW and editing my latest novel during the day, I'm composing and recording music in the evenings... No Rest for the Wicked, as I once sang! BTW, as well as Lydie M Denier, I'm proud to announce another Hollywood star has chosen Magellan Books to launch her latest book to coincide with her new TV series in October. Cool, or what? More news on that soon - coming to an inbox near you! Anyway... I'm probably one of the last people in the world to read "What the BLEEP Do We Know?" By now most of the ideas in it are well publicized and known thanks to movies like The Secret and the media blitz that accompanied it a few years back. A lot of self help gurus are still peddling the Law of Attraction or their version of it ...