Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

  New writers often talk about their quest to be published. They talk as though it's the end result to their work - as though, when they're published, everything will change and be wonderful.    This is not exactly how it works for most professional writers. Getting your stuff published is often only the beginning - the starting point for a career that may, after a while, feel very much like where you are now - as in, working for a living! You may improve as a writer. You may start to find it easier - though I doubt it. You may have success - whatever that means to you. But at the end of the day, wherever you may be in your writing career - a newbie or a seasoned pro - you're still in a constant burgeoning relationship with words. I use the word 'relationship' deliberately - because I think we should see writing as a kind of mistress, toy-boy or lover. Listen. Your starting point and your end point is to improve the way you communicate your ideas through writing. An...

    The next big thing the world can look forward to is a massive million dollar franchise called Skibidi Toilet . You heard it here first. Let's face it, the evidence is all around us. If you pitch your writing at a fourteen-year-old, you'll be monstrously successful. And I don't necessarily mean that you need to write about fourteen-year-olds, I mean you should write for that intellectual level. Hollywood has known this since Jaws and Star Wars , when Spielberg and Lucas proved that nobody really wants adult movies. People want escapism. And they want to feel young again. Marvel, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros, Disney, they all aim their stories at an intellectual age of fourteen.  Many adult writers finally come out of the closet to write YA novels - which, to me, read just like adult novels but without the blood and violence. The big market is pubescent. The late great Michael Chrichton also understood this principle. Look at the body of his work: Jurass...

I was recently interested to read about brain waves and how they work, and apply what I could glean to writing. Here's the basic info: Beta Waves In our normal waking lives our brain waves pulse quickly, at between 14 to 100 Hz. These are called Beta waves and are good at keeping us awake and attentive enough for our daily tasks - working, playing, eating, socializing and watching TV and movies. Curiously Beta waves aren't that conducive to prolonged study or activities like factory or office work because at the Beta level, the brain is looking for stimulation. It's as attentive as a butterfly, constantly vigilant for more stimuli and easily bored by monotony. Gamma Waves Gamma waves pulse at a higher rate - from 24 to around 70000 Hz and are normally associated with a 'higher state of consciousness' in that they seem to give us an increased sense of meaning and connectedness to the world around us. Commonly, during times of inspiration and joy, or playi...

  Does anyone actually read anymore? I'm not sure. I do, of course. I read fiction every day. Love it. But I know from my own experience that when I'm surfing the Net, I generally don't read articles all the way through. For most of us the purpose of surfing is get information quickly. And besides, reading off a screen can be tiring. So we tend to skim. Surfing is actually a good word for it. We rarely dive in and explore the sea of information available. We ride the surface of it, soaking in the spray, barely getting our feet wet... Okay, enough of this metaphor! Does anyone actually read articles anymore? I'm not sure. Scientists have proven that we don't actually read words anyway. What we do is recognize phrases - collections of words - that create mental images in our minds. It's those images that we use to absorb the information we need. Not the words at all. Hence the need for quick bites of info - the way news is reported nowadays, in puls...

  It's every writer's dream. To write something that sells millions and pretty much guarantees you a place in history. Now that's sweet - the idea of it anyway. Of course, you have to remember it's every publisher's dream too. I read a publisher's blog recently that said that even in the US, it was rare for any author to sell more than a few hundred of their own books - and only then if they were lucky. I know that mainstream publishers with worldwide distribution often have trouble selling the first print run of what they call their 'B List' authors - a title which pretty much covers the majority of us! That's the reality. For every bestselling author that sells millions of copies of their book, there are perhaps a thousand, more likely ten thousand other authors who get by selling barely enough of their books to justify their publishing deals. Many career writers who receive (often small) advances on their work usually don't start...