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.)
