Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

  From “Just Say No” to “Could We Maybe Not Upset Him?” Once upon a time, the solution to a complex social problem was refreshingly simple. Drugs? Just say no. That was the Ronald Reagan era in a nutshell: a firm jaw, a wagging finger, and the confidence that saying no loudly enough would cause reality to fall into line out of sheer respect. Fast-forward a few decades and we appear to have lost the ability to say no to anyone who actually needs to hear it. Children are now encouraged to express their feelings, negotiate boundaries, and explore why they might feel like doing something destructive. Meanwhile, tyrants invade neighbors, flatten cities, threaten nuclear annihilation, and the global response sounds like a polite dinner guest asking whether now might be a good time to discuss boundaries. Why can’t they just say no? Why do politicians fold like deck chairs when confronted by bullies with tanks? Why do world leaders suddenly develop an allergy to clarity? And why ...

  Power, Delusion, and Moral Deafness History keeps asking the same question, and powerful people keep failing it. Why do victors who rule through cruelty, destruction, or collective punishment so often expect gratitude, obedience, even admiration from those they have crushed? Somewhere deep inside the psychology of conquest is a catastrophic miscalculation – the belief that power can substitute for legitimacy, and that fear can be mistaken for love. This is not a new phenomenon. It is as old as empire itself. Consider Alexander the Great , marching across the ancient world with military brilliance and staggering violence. Alexander believed not only that he had the right to rule conquered peoples, but that they would eventually recognize that right. He adopted local customs, demanded divine honors, and expected reverence. Yet again and again, resistance followed him. Revolts flared the moment his army moved on. What Alexander mistook for admiration was submission under duress. ...

  There’s a question that keeps resurfacing in modern culture, louder each time it’s asked, and never quite answered:   Does bad behavior negate great art? I’ve started calling this tension the Picasso Paradox – the uneasy space where human failure and artistic brilliance collide, and where society has to decide what survives the impact. The paradox exists because we want two incompatible things at once. We want art to matter – to shape us, challenge us, stay with us. But we also want artists to be morally legible, preferably admirable, and ideally aligned with the values of the present moment. When those two desires come into conflict, the result is discomfort, outrage, denial, or erasure. Take Pablo Picasso . By any reasonable measure, he was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His work reshaped visual language. Yet his treatment of women was manipulative, cruel, and by modern standards indefensible. This isn’t speculation – it’s well documented...

  There is a particular kind of sibling relationship that never quite settles. It doesn’t resolve into affection, nor does it collapse into outright hostility. Instead, it oscillates. Love with teeth. Admiration sharpened into resentment. Loyalty laced with competition. If you’re the older sibling in this arrangement, especially the older brother, you tend to notice it first. The younger sister often pretends not to. I think my sister hated me almost as much as she loved me. Which is to say, passionately. She grew up in my shadow. That’s the family myth, anyway. I never cast it deliberately. I wasn’t standing on a hilltop blocking the sun. I was just there first. Older. Smarter. Apparently competent. The sort of child adults smiled at and said, “He’ll go far,” which is the most dangerous sentence ever spoken within earshot of a younger sibling. To her, I was the benchmark. The reference point. The irritating standard against which she was constantly measured, whether she asked f...

  There is a strange, almost mathematical rhythm to the way we relate to our parents. Not a neat, polite equation - more like a drunken sine wave that staggers across the decades, bumping into resentment, gratitude, embarrassment, and finally an uncomfortable recognition when you catch yourself saying something and think, Oh God. That was my mother. It’s tempting to believe our relationship with our parents is fixed. That it is either good or bad, loving or damaged, close or distant. But in truth, it’s more like a long serial drama, with shifting genres, recast roles, and the occasional mid-season crisis. The same characters, yes - but wildly different interpretations depending on how old we are when we’re watching. Let’s start at the beginning. From one to ten, we need them. Completely. Utterly. In ways that feel so obvious they barely register. Parents are not people at this stage; they are infrastructure. They are gravity, oxygen, heat, and snacks. They are the ones who make...

  If you’ve spent any time browsing Amazon’s bestseller lists in the last few years, you’ve probably seen the same pattern over and over: books with magical worlds and emotional romances near the top of the charts, selling not just well but astonishingly well. That’s not a coincidence — it’s the rise of a whole genre that’s redefining how readers think about fantasy and love. That genre is known as romantasy — a deliberate blending of romance and fantasy where the emotional journey between characters matters just as much as the magical stakes around them. And right now, it’s one of the most commercially successful categories in fiction, especially on platforms like Amazon where dedicated categories and bestseller lists highlight its growth. From Niche to Market Force Romantasy didn’t come out of nowhere. Fantasy and romance have been popular genres for decades, but they didn’t always overlap in meaningful ways. Traditional fantasy tended to focus on quests, magic systems, p...

  Backstory is one of those things writers know they shouldn’t overdo and then immediately overdo anyway. We all start with good intentions. We tell ourselves we’ll sprinkle it in lightly. Just a hint here, a memory there. Next thing we know, we’ve written three pages explaining a character’s childhood trauma, their parents’ divorce, the summer they learned to hate boats, and the exact emotional significance of a chipped mug. And the reader? The reader has quietly left the room... The core problem with backstory isn’t that it exists. It’s that writers treat it like a moral obligation. As though the reader has paid for a full psychological report and will feel cheated if we don’t deliver. They won’t. Readers are not here for your character’s résumé. They are here for what’s happening now . Backstory is seasoning, not the meal. And like seasoning, a little improves everything – too much ruins it. The first rule of backstory is brutally simple: if it isn’t affecting the ...