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.)