The Sunday Salon: The Communist Manifesto

As part of The Sunday Salon — a blog­ging exper­i­ment where read­ers post brief art­icles on the books they’re cur­rently read­ing — here’s the tome I’m per­us­ing today: The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. It is a doc­u­ment designed to cap­ture the essen­tial nature of com­mun­ism in the form pushed by European revolu­tion­ar­ies in the mid nine­teenth cen­tury, as agreed at a London com­mit­tee meeting.

Oddly, this edi­tion begins with an intro­duc­tion that takes up fully half of the book. Thanks, but that’s not what I paid for. Then the reader gets treated to a dozen pre­faces that seem to take up half of the remain­ing half. But Bert and Ernie — sorry, Marx and Engels — soon launch into their revolu­tion­ary tract. What an eye-opener. It’s great to get defin­i­tions of ‘pro­let­ariat’ and ‘bour­geois’ from the horses’ mouths. And, thus far, it’s clearly writ­ten and straightforward.

I’m read­ing the book as research for the novel I’m cur­rently writ­ing. I wouldn’t call this primary research, because my novel does not deal dir­ectly with com­mun­ism. But I’d feel a bit sheep­ish writ­ing about pre-revolutionary Russia and not hav­ing read The Communist Manifesto (or Capital).

The book is avail­able for free online.

Pulling out

It’s been a dis­ap­point­ing day. This morn­ing, the Canterbury half mara­thon took place and I wasn’t there. Or, rather, I was there — in the crowd, cheer­ing on my friend Nir.

About three weeks ago, I was get­ting towards the end of a ten kilo­metre run when I my left knee — slightly dodgy already, thanks to my pre­vi­ous two half mara­thons — exploded in a shower of gristle. Well, OK; it just hurt and I had to hop home. I waited a couple of days, did another run, and couldn’t make half the dis­tance. Then I waited a week, but on my next run couldn’t make quarter of the distance.

Obviously, I’ve dam­aged my knee and it needs to be res­ted. This means that I’ve col­lec­ted a wadge of spon­sor­ship money without actu­ally doing the half mara­thon, so if you’ve sponsored me and you want your money back, I’ll be happy to reim­burse you (the money has already gone to the Canterbury Pilgrims Hospices).

I will, of course, still be giv­ing away a free copy of Déjà Vu to one of my spon­sors, picked at random.

The Friday Project

The saga of this start-up, which was tipped as a com­pany to watch way back in 2006¹, has ended with its key assets being pur­chased by HarperCollins. One might argue that the mat­ter is closed. However, the Bookseller ran an in-depth piece on the débâcle² last Thursday. It’s worth read­ing as a closely-described account of the busi­ness from start to finish.

What was The Friday Project?

Taking con­tent from such sites as “London by London” and Tom Reynolds’ blog about life in an ambu­lance, TFP inten­ded to “truly put the inter­net at the heart of our pub­lish­ing strategy”, as pub­lish­ing dir­ector Clare Christian said at the time. Editor-in-chief Paul Carr was more bolshy. “We may crash and burn, but it will be because we screwed up,” he declared. “And if we make mil­lions, then it’s our success.”

It did crash; there is evid­ence of singe­ing. So what went wrong?

“Mismanagement in a lot of ways, bad luck I’m sure, and books not doing as well as we’d thought,” says a decidedly shaken-looking Christian. “We spent too much money on pro­mot­ing ourselves.”

The evid­ence, as I judge it from this art­icle (and other sources), is that The Friday Project exper­i­enced early growth and made a pre­dic­tion of con­tin­ued growth that did not come to pass. Christian took a gamble in the clos­ing stages — one that appears reas­on­ably sens­ible, a clas­sic ‘tough call’ — but it didn’t pay off.

There are one or two obser­va­tions to make about the whole thing. First, I’m genu­inely puzzled by the extent to which onlook­ers have cel­eb­rated the demise of the com­pany and used the oppor­tun­ity to present their super­ior busi­ness ideas: pub­lish bet­ter books; spend less money on mar­ket­ing. Yes, there will be many cred­it­ors out of pocket; but there are too few to account for the vit­riol that one finds in the com­ments sec­tion of any art­icle that men­tions The Friday Project.

Second, from the writer’s per­spect­ive, it’s always use­ful to be reminded of the fin­an­cial dis­aster that awaits pub­lish­ers who put out books that do not sell. I’ve often bemoaned the celebrity mem­oir cul­ture of mod­ern book selling, but pub­lish­ers do have a bot­tom line. (No doubt I’ll have for­got­ten this insight by next week.)

Anyway, the singed rem­nants of The Friday Project will soon re-emerge phoenix-like. I hope it doesn’t stall in the rather neg­at­ive draughts of opinion.

Forget me not

Episodic memory is some­times called auto­bi­o­graph­ical memory (though cer­tain neur­os­cient­ists con­sider them to be dif­fer­ent phe­nom­ena). This refers to the exper­i­en­tial remem­brance of one’s own life: what one had for break­fast, one’s first day at school, and so on.

Forgetfulness is fun­da­mental to the human cog­nit­ive sys­tem. Without it, all man­ner of inform­a­tion pro­cessing tasks would grind to a halt. What would hap­pen if your brain mal­func­tioned and lost its abil­ity to for­get auto­bi­o­graph­ical memory? You’d never for­get where you left your keys. A good thing or a bad thing?

Jill Price (known as AJ in the lit­er­at­ure) has hyper­thy­mestic syn­drome, and she was recently inter­viewed for a local NPR sta­tion in the United States.

[She] has a memory like few oth­ers in the world. She’s 42 years old, and she remem­bers everything.

Quite an extraordin­ary con­di­tion. If you’re inter­ested in these things, I’d recom­mend Alexander Luria’s won­der­ful mono­graph on a Russian man called Solomon Shereshevskii, who appeared to have an unlim­ited memory thanks, in part, to his syn­aes­thesia.

Humanity’s future is blister-free calluses! — Iain M. Banks interviewed

According to our friends over at the Cable News Network:

Author Iain M. Banks, whose “Culture” nov­els have made him one of sci­ence fiction’s lead­ing lights, has cre­ated a uto­pian uni­verse where altru­istic robot space­ships care for genetically-enhanced humanoids, where no one wants for any­thing and where people are freed from the chores of daily life to express them­selves as they choose.

I fin­ished Matter (as an audiobook) not two months ago. ‘Rip’ and ‘roar­ing’ spring to the fingers.

Fudging a digit or two

I’m dis­ap­poin­ted to read this BBC News story about some mem­bers of the staff at Kingston University (London) telling stu­dents to pos­it­ively skew their answers in the National Student Survey. (Disclaimer: I’m an Associate Lecturer at the Open University.)

“If Kingston comes down the bot­tom, the bot­tom line is that nobody is going to want to employ you,” staff warned.

It comes back to the fin­an­cial con­sequences of the sur­vey, which cre­ates a pres­sure — usu­ally within the man­age­ment — to emphas­ise the neces­sity of com­ing high on the league table.

This is sur­pris­ing in the sense that I genu­inely don’t think the prob­lem is wide­spread (though see the com­ments stu­dents have added to the art­icle), but it’s just another demon­stra­tion that some ele­ments of aca­demia are not improved with the applic­a­tion of mar­ket forces. RAE, any­one?

If you’re a stu­dent, do what comes nat­ur­ally — ignore your lec­tur­ers and write what you bloody well want

So Lit Rep

This blog has been banging on like a mis­fir­ing Energizer Bunny since July 2004. At that point, I had writ­ten the first draft of my novel Déjà Vu, and it was — I think — in the hands my erstwhile editor, the top notch Aliya Whiteley¹.

My first entry, entitled Reading the clas­sics, began:

Today sees the start of my new blog, which is designed to express views and opin­ions about writ­ing and publishing.

Because my novel had already found a home with a tra­di­tional (albeit small) pub­lisher, I did not chron­icle my exper­i­ences of rejec­tion, re-submission and the gen­er­ally breakdown-inducing jig­gery pokery that con­sti­tutes get­ting pub­lished. I did, how­ever, go on to talk about my struggles to find an agent.

When I found him, and his name was John Jarrold.

Is an agent worth it?

I want to take a few moments to write down my cur­rent think­ing about lit­er­ary representation.

An agent is not necessary

There are many writers who make a good liv­ing without rep­res­ent­a­tion. I seem to recall that Iain Banks — who, coin­cid­ent­ally, will be in con­ver­sa­tion with my agent Lincoln Literary Festival this Monday — has never been rep­res­en­ted by an agent. He has dealt dir­ectly with edit­ors since the begin­ning of his career. But it is my impres­sion that the major­ity of writers are rep­res­en­ted. That alone should indic­ate that hav­ing an agent is, for the major­ity, a good idea.

An agent will take a cut of your earn­ings but will prob­ably increase your earn­ings above this cut

Your pub­lisher will, at length, pass on your roy­alty cheque to your agent. He or she will then, at length, pass it on to you — with a deduc­tion. I’ve often read that an agent is a bad thing for a writer because they reduce earn­ings, but the like­li­hood is that, sans agent, your earn­ings will be lower that your agen­ted earn­ing minus the ten per cent. There is a very real chance they will be zero.

An agent can act like an editor

Editors are not the raven­ous, bugblat­ter beasts of pub­lish­ing they once were. They can­not com­mis­sion a book imme­di­ately they read a draft; they must take it to one or more com­mit­tees and pitch it as though it were the next Harry Potter. They must love the book. They will not love the book if its com­plec­tion is spotty with typos, or wonky with under­developed ele­ments that the writer is hop­ing to fix later. The days when this was accept­able — accord­ing to my agent, and to other people I’ve met in the industry — are gone. You need to present an editor with a product that is nigh per­fect. This means that the editor is more likely to fall head over heels, and it means that the pub­lisher doesn’t have to invest in fur­ther edit­or­ial resources. The agent, of course, has a fin­an­cial stake in the suc­cess of your book, and should have exper­i­ence of what a given editor, or the industry at large, will and will not accept; they’ll help put the manu­script on a diet, check it into a gym, whatever it needs.

An agent can tell you to chill the fuck out

Until you have an agent, you’re essen­tially on your own. Sure, your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/Wilson can give you sym­path­etic looks when you’re into the sixth month of a manu­script that’s going nowhere. They can send you a sup­port­ive SMS when every­one else is in the pub but you’re at home, writ­ing. But, with an agent, you can call them up and check pro­gress on your vari­ous pro­jects. Your agent will be used to deal­ing with pan­icky writers, and will be happy to say, ‘Yeah, well I showed it to Xavier at Yankie Doodle the other day and he asked to look at the manu­script; there’s some film interest’ und so weiter. It really helps. It cuts through the mad­den­ing wall of silence that bricks you out when you send unso­li­cited manu­scripts. Most pub­lish­ers don’t bother to get back to you; when they do, it’s often a little post­card cit­ing a rejec­tion that has noth­ing, of course, to do with the qual­ity of the manu­script but the size of their lists.

I’ve con­figured my email cli­ent to bounce its icon when some­thing arrives from my agent.

An agent is well connected

You might think you are. You might even know lots of writers, illus­trat­ors and com­mis­sion­ing edit­ors. But it’s dif­fi­cult to use these pro­fes­sional con­tacts because they won’t see you as a good source about the qual­ity of your own work. It costs you less to be rejec­ted. For the agent, who swims in these waters, the cost is a little higher, because each ‘rejec­tion’ is a reflec­tion on his or her judge­ment. So, all things being equal (i.e. you aren’t the god­son of the publisher’s major investor), when an agent offers a manu­script, it gets more atten­tion — and more pro­fes­sional atten­tion. An agent can attend trade fairs and talk to many pub­lish­ers, film makers and other cre­at­ive pro­fes­sion­als. A writer at the same trade show will get funny looks.

An agent can kick ass and take names

It might be dif­fi­cult for you to main­tain a busi­ness rela­tion­ship with your pub­lisher. After all, they like your work and this makes you grate­ful. So when the roy­alty cheques don’t arrive or the review cop­ies get lost in the post or your pub­lisher puts pres­sure on you to shoulder 90% of the mar­ket­ing, you may not find it easy to com­plain. An agent will have no such com­punc­tion. His or her rela­tion­ship with the pub­lisher is busi­ness­like and will not blush on mat­ters of nitty gritty.

How do you get one?

This can be summed up in a sen­tence: You need to con­vince an agent that they can make money from you.

Cash

This is not to say that the whole thing is about money. Agents are in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness because they like books. They will need to like, and even love, the work that you pro­duce. But they will not spend time advoc­at­ing work that can­not be sold.

Track record

So, you need to indic­ate that reas­on­ably inde­pend­ent, third-party (i.e. not you or your mum) pub­lish­ers have accep­ted your work for pub­lic­a­tion. That means short stor­ies, nov­els, art­icles, whatever. Do you have reviews of your work? Has any­one with their own track record com­men­ted favour­ably on your fiction?

Professionalism

An agent will prob­ably not be will­ing to work with someone who is stark star­ing bonkers. You might be a writer, but you will need to do many things that involve meet­ing people, being reli­able, and so on. You should come across as a nor­mal per­son. Agents don’t want calls at 2 a.m. com­pris­ing vitu­per­at­ive tirades about the people who just don’t get you. So I’d sug­gest approach­ing agents as though you’re a pro­fes­sional who has been doing this writ­ing lark for years, and intends to do it for sev­eral more years. Be polite, not quirky. Be brief. Don’t place time demands on the agent.

Agency size

Some are huge, inter­na­tional behemoths cap­able of buy­ing a small coun­try. Others are Jerry Maguire-style one-person out­fits who work from a broom cup­board. The advant­ages of a large agency: clout with edit­ors; abil­ity to lever­age large advances; in-house edit­or­ial sup­port. The primary dis­ad­vant­age: as a new writer, you are quite unlikely to make any money what­so­ever. This means that, if the agent is effi­cient (which they will be; they’re suc­cess­ful), they will pay much more atten­tion to the fewer writers who con­trib­ute most to their income. Your own manu­script might take longer to edit; it might be dif­fi­cult to get hold of your agent when you have a query; you might find your­self speak­ing to his or her sec­ret­ary more than you’d like.

The dis­ad­vant­age of a small agency: edit­or­ial sup­port might be lim­ited; your agent may have less clout. The advant­ages: a more per­sonal approach, and more sense of a team; you’re more likely to get hold of them for that 2 a.m. tirade about the people who just don’t get you.

My advice — and please let’s bear in mind that I’ve only had one novel pub­lished, and I’m no grizzled vet­eran (though I intend to be) — is that the smal­ler agen­cies will serve you better.

Agencies really don’t have to be large. Remember that the UK pub­lish­ing industry is the same size as the bagged salad industry. Repeat after me: Bagged. Salad.

Approaching an agency

You can cut down your work­load by exclud­ing the agents who (i) are not tak­ing on new cli­ents and (ii) would not like your work. The first part is reas­on­ably straight­for­ward. You can find a list of agents in the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook (enjoy that look of with­er­ing pity from the girl on the till as you pur­chase this tone). Or you can check out this list by Gerard Jones, author of Ginny Good.

Finding an agent recept­ive to your fic­tion is more dif­fi­cult. If you’ve atten­ded genre-specific con­fer­ences (I’m think­ing of sci­ffy), you may well have chat­ted to agents over a pint. Perhaps your favour­ite author was there; if so, go back in time and ask who their agent is. Who is your favour­ite author, by the way? If you write like them — admit it, you do — and they’re not push­ing up the dais­ies, type their name into Google and find out the name of their agent. Then email the agent. If the agent turns you down, tell them that you value their opin­ion as an import­ant per­son in the industry and ask them to recom­mend another agent. Then you can approach another agent, cit­ing that recommendation.

On that sub­ject, it is very help­ful if you have an ‘in’. It cre­ates the impres­sion that you’re not just some bloke or blokette off the street. So, if you read an inter­view with a given agent in a magazine, start your email with ‘I was inter­ested to read your views on.…and thought I would email you about the pos­sib­il­ity of rep­res­ent­a­tion’. Or ask someone in the industry if there is an agent they would recom­mend. Then you can start your email with ‘I spoke to Joe ‘M’ Bloggs last week and he recom­men­ded that I speak to you about representation’.

Email, by the way, seems to be the most suc­cess­ful method. I’ve left count­less answer machine mes­sages that have not been returned; I guess it’s just too effort­ful. A phone call is an inter­rup­tion; an email is not.

My exper­i­ence

There are many ways of being suc­cess­ful in this industry. It’s a rel­at­ive term, any­way. Here is how I landed my agent, the excel­lent John Jarrold.

I wrote my novel Déjà Vu and sub­mit­ted to all the super­mar­kets inter­ested in bagged salad. Sorry; I mean: I sub­mit­ted it to lots of pub­lish­ers (not agents). Probably about fifty. One or two asked for the full manu­script and I never heard from them again. Next, I sank into a fit of depres­sion and re-worked the manu­script. I sent it to a small pub­lisher called The UKA Press and had it accepted.

Nine months or so later, the book was pub­lished. More accur­ately, the ini­tial proof of the book was pub­lished — typos and all — because there wasn’t enough money to get around to pub­lish­ing a final proof. My pub­lisher sent out a hand­ful of review cop­ies. I bought about sixty and sent out cop­ies to every man and his dog. I also appeared on local radio, local TV (that was great! I miss you, YorkTV²), and did inter­view after inter­view. I was very lucky with the review cov­er­age I received, and most of the crit­ics didn’t men­tion the typos (snip­pets of the reviews appear ran­domly in the title bar). I still remem­ber open­ing up The Guardian and read­ing Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s lovely review.

I wrote a blog post about the ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult job I had of get­ting cop­ies of the book into Waterstone’s, in which, I seem to recall, I was very rough on a svengali char­ac­ter called Scott Pack, who was the Chief Buyer for Waterstones and gen­er­ally recog­nised as the most powerful/evil man in pub­lish­ing. He emailed me shortly there­after say­ing ‘If it’s so good, send me a copy and we’ll see about stock­ing it’. Scott emailed me back with a pos­it­ive review, but reit­er­ated that Waterstone’s would never pub­lish it because of its POD pub­lish­ing model and its awful cover. He did, how­ever, tell me to get in touch with an agent called Ivan Mulcahy. Ivan read then read the book, but that’s as far as we got. He didn’t ‘love’ the book and thought he wouldn’t be the best per­son to rep­res­ent me, which was entirely fair enough.

The book went out of print. I tried to keep it alive by pro­du­cing a pod­cast. I sent about writ­ing a sequel and an unre­lated com­edy novel. En passant, I com­pleted my PhD.

A New York film agency con­tac­ted me early last year enquir­ing about the film rights. Simultaneously, another small pub­lisher became inter­ested in Déjà Vu. The tech­nic­al­it­ies with my pre­vi­ous con­tract for Déjà Vu, together with the US agent ask­ing if I had a UK agent, nudged me into think­ing that it was time for representation.

I found John Jarrold by googling ‘sci­ence fic­tion agent’ (I couldn’t face another pity­ing look from the cash­ier at Waterstone’s when I pur­chased the new Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook) partly because so many agents don’t seem to have any exper­i­ence with sci­ffy. It turned out that John had already heard of my book from its review in The Guardian. He was impressed by this and other reviews, pleased to hear about the American interest and the interest from the small pub­lisher, and asked to read the book. He did, and snapped me up and here we are.

Conclusions

Well, that turned into a rather long post. I hope it’s use­ful to some­body. My advice would be: try to get as much work pub­lished as pos­sible, in order that you estab­lish your­self; find an agent who is avail­able, who suits you, and with whom you get on. Best of luck!

Charlie’s Diary: Bang, Bucks, and Delivery in Recompense

Charles Stross has pos­ted some typ­ic­ally thought­ful com­ments on the nature of length in fic­tion. What, exactly, is a short story and how does it dif­fer from a novel? Can a novel itself be a chapter?

It’s a tru­ism of the writ­ing busi­ness that short stor­ies are not like nov­els. There are any num­ber of nov­el­ists who simply can’t work effect­ively in the cramped space of a short story; and there are many writers for whom the short form is their nat­ural métier and the wide vis­tas of a novel seem impossible to fill, an invit­a­tion to agoraphobia.

This is some­thing I think about as I write the third book in a ‘uni­verse’ that I’ve put together as I go along. I don’t really have plot threads con­nect­ing the books, though some char­ac­ters overlap.

Also of interest are some of Mr Stross’s com­ments on the con­ven­tion behind the nomen­clature of stor­ies. For me, flash fic­tion is about 100 words in length, which is why my fic­tion flash pod­cast is about a minute in length, on aver­age. But what do I know?

(Via Charlie’s diary.)

Twittering through Time

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a free social net­work­ing and micro-blogging ser­vice that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 char­ac­ters long) to the Twitter web­site, via short mes­sage ser­vice (e.g. on a cell phone), instant mes­saging, or a third-party applic­a­tion such as Twitterrific or Facebook.

You’ll have noticed that I include my Twitter feed in the footer text of this web­site. So, when I’m drink­ing a cof­fee and feel that the world needs to know; or I’m stuck on a train out­side Basingstoke; or I’m watch­ing Dr Who…then I can tweet.

Twitter is one of those tech­no­lo­gies that gives Web 2.0 a bad name. That is, whenever I explain it to people who don’t use social net­work­ing thingies, they look at me like I’m a com­plete idiot.

Just like you’re look­ing at your web browser right now, very probably.

For a long while, I’ve been inter­ested in some­how cap­tur­ing — live — the pro­cess of cre­at­ing a novel. I’d like to put together a form of par­al­lel art that mir­rors the inser­tion, dele­tion and move­ment of words around the manu­script, and per­haps make a time-lapse film of it. I’m still a long way from being able to do this. Some spe­cies of screen cap­ture tech­no­logy poin­ted at my word pro­cessor might do the trick, but the band­width implic­a­tion makes me dizzy.

So, as part of this exper­i­ment­a­tion with reflect­ing the ongo­ing devel­op­ment of a novel, I have cre­ated a Twitter account for my heroine, Saskia Brandt. The cur­rent novel (my third in this series; the first was pub­lished as Déjà Vu) is set in 1907. That’s where my time trav­el­ler has wound up.

Who is Saskia Brandt? (If you haven’t read Déjà Vu and think you might, look away now.) Saskia is phys­ic­ally fit, about 30 years old — nobody is quite sure of her age — and a former detect­ive with the European Föderatives Investigationsbüro, a spe­cial­ist organ­isa­tion set up in 2019 to address EU-wide com­puter crime. She was for­cibly put through an exper­i­mental pro­ced­ure that left her with a small, glass-covered chip at the back of her brain. It con­tains a digital copy of a murdered woman’s mind. It con­tains what is, essen­tially, Saskia’s per­son­al­ity. The ori­ginal per­son­al­ity of her phys­ical brain is sup­pressed; though it can usurp con­trol in her dreams and moments of stress. Various skills were flashed onto the chip before inser­tion, includ­ing weapons hand­ling, lan­guage com­pet­ency (she under­stands more than 6000 lan­guages), and spe­cial pro­grams that post-process sens­ory inform­a­tion. In 2023, she trav­elled back­wards in time and is cur­rently being hunted by her former employ­ers. Now she’s in St Petersburg in 1907.

Saskia Brandt is going to tweet her ‘status’ as the cur­rent novel is being writ­ten. You’re very wel­come to add Saskia to your Twitter friends, if you have an account. She’ll add you straight back. Her Twitter address is: http://twitter.com/saskiabrandt You don’t, by the way, need an account to fol­low her. Her status updates are now included in the page footer, and you can visit the above address manually.

Here are some rules:

• She will update her status about once a day; her time frame is ‘live’ in the sense that she will tweet about things hap­pen­ing to her in that day’s writ­ing session
• Her statuses will con­tain teas­ers, not spoilers
• Though she is updat­ing her status as though she had a mobile phone in 1907, the char­ac­ter in the final novel will not be stop­ping every few pages to send a tweet
• Saskia will reply to your ques­tions if you ask them, but will not spoil the story

Interested? Then make Saskia a Twitter friend. I’m cur­rently 4400 words into the manu­script (which will total around 100,000), so Saskia will be tweet­ing for the next few months. Here’s the latest tweet. For her, it’s November 1907 and she’s trav­el­ling into St Petersburg on behalf of a crim­inal organ­isa­tion which (I think) she’s just betrayed.

How does a working writer keep improving?

John August, suc­cess­ful Hollywood screen­writer and blog­ger, posts some thoughts on how to raise your game as a writer while working.

My advice for you is to ded­ic­ate one day a week to dis­as­sembling good movies. Take exist­ing films (and one-hour dra­mas) and break them down to cards. Think of your­self as an ordin­ary mech­anic given the task of reverse-engineering a space­ship. Figure out what the pieces do, and why they were put together in that way.

Visual storytelling is a crit­ical skill in the novelist’s arsenal too, and one that is, I think, often underdeveloped.

(Via johnaugust.com.)