Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

  I remember the moment clearly, even now. I was about six years old, standing at a family gathering, watching adults talk over one another, laugh at things that didn’t seem funny, repeat the same stories with tiny variations. Nothing dramatic was happening. No crisis. No revelation delivered by thunder. Just a sudden, quiet realization. This is strange. Not “bad” strange. Not frightening. Just deeply odd. Human beings performing rituals they don’t seem aware of. Roles they’ve inherited without question. Lives moving along grooves already cut for them. And I remember thinking, with the clarity only a child can have, I need to remember this feeling . Not just the event, but the sensation of standing slightly outside it. The awareness. The distance. That was the moment I decided I wanted to be a writer. Not because I wanted fame. Or money. Or applause. But because writing felt like the only way to make sense of the world without flattening it. A way to record what it felt like...

  Here’s the honest truth most writers won’t say out loud. Creating villains used to be easy. If you go back far enough in popular fiction – adventure stories, thrillers, war novels, early spy fiction – “foreign” was often enough. Different accent, unfamiliar customs, strange food, odd manners, a name that didn’t sound local. That was all a reader needed. The shorthand worked because it aligned with a world that already divided itself neatly into us and them. Writers didn’t have to think too hard about it. The villain arrived pre-loaded. But that world is gone. And in many ways, thank f**k for that – because it was lazy, reductive, and often cruel. But its disappearance has created a genuine craft problem for modern writers, one that doesn’t get discussed enough outside writing rooms and private conversations. How do you create convincing bad guys now, without accidentally turning an entire nationality, culture, or identity into the problem? Because readers have changed. And...

  Here’s the uncomfortable truth, and I’ll say it plainly. We’ve crossed a line. For years, writers, comedians, philosophers, and ordinary people joked about a future where thought itself became suspect. Where intention mattered less than interpretation. Where saying the wrong thing, or being perceived the wrong way, was enough to place you under scrutiny. It sounded dystopian. Overcooked. A little too Orwellian to be taken seriously. And yet here we are. With these latest hate speech laws, something fundamental has shifted. Not just legally, but culturally. Suspicion has crept into the center of the room and quietly taken a seat at the table. Not proof. Not action. Not harm. Suspicion. And suspicion, once elevated to moral authority, is a dangerous thing. This is not an argument for cruelty, hatred, or abuse. Let’s be clear about that from the outset. Societies have a responsibility to protect people from genuine harm. Violence. Threats. Harassment. Incitement. These things...

  The embarrassing spectacle of self-aggrandizement is not embarrassing because confidence is shameful. It’s embarrassing because it mistakes noise for substance, display for worth, and self-advertisement for achievement. At its core, self-aggrandizement is insecurity dressed up as certainty. It announces itself too loudly, too often, and too desperately. The person who truly is something rarely needs to keep telling the room what they are. The need to constantly proclaim one’s brilliance, virtue, suffering, success, or importance is usually a sign that these things feel fragile on the inside. What makes it particularly awkward to witness is the imbalance between claim and evidence. Genuine accomplishment carries a quiet weight. It alters the way others respond without being declared. Self-aggrandizement, by contrast, demands applause in advance. It insists on recognition before it has earned trust. The audience is placed in an uncomfortable position: expected to validate a perf...

  Persecution, when it is real, is unmistakable. It is systemic. It is enforced from above. It carries consequences that cannot be opted out of. History leaves us no shortage of genuine examples. People stripped of rights, livelihoods, safety, even humanity, because of who they were or what they believed. Real persecution does not need to announce itself. It leaves marks. But something has changed. In the modern era, persecution has been repurposed. Not as a condition to be resisted, but as a weapon to be claimed . Victimhood is no longer merely endured; it is increasingly performed , leveraged , and deployed as a form of power. This shift has profound consequences for dialogue, justice, and truth. When suffering becomes currency The first thing to understand is this: persecution carries moral authority. Those who are genuinely persecuted deserve protection, attention, and redress. Their claims cut through noise because they are grounded in material harm. That moral weig...

  If you want to understand how power really works, don’t start with laws or weapons or money. Start with attention. Who controls it. Who redirects it. Who decides what you look at while something else is happening just out of sight. Distraction is not a modern invention. It is one of the oldest tools ever used by human beings to influence other human beings. Magicians understood it long before politicians did. Writers understood it long before rulers admitted to it. And today, it has become so normalized that we barely recognize it for what it is. Which is exactly the point. The magician’s lesson: the hand you’re watching is never the hand doing the work Every magician learns the same foundational rule early on: the trick is not in the move – it’s in the misdirection . The secret action is usually small, dull, and technically unimpressive. What makes it effective is that you are encouraged to look somewhere else. A flourish. A joke. A gesture. A question. Your attention is...

  The line “If you want to know who is in control, ask who you’re not allowed to criticize” has become one of those sentences that feels as if it has always existed. It appears on social media graphics, protest placards, comment threads, podcasts, and late-night conversations between people trying to make sense of the world. It is often attributed to someone else - Voltaire, Orwell, Twain, take your pick - but it belongs to no one famous. And that matters more than people realize. Because the power of the phrase is not in its authorship. It is in its accuracy. A sentence without a passport Historically, aphorisms like this tend to get retroactively “promoted” to famous thinkers. We like our truths to arrive with credentials. A quote feels safer when it comes stamped with a philosopher’s name. But this line resists that instinct. It is not poetic in a classical way. It is blunt. Functional. Almost forensic. That suggests its true origin is not a lecture hall or a book of essa...