So there I was, ready to sit down with the draft of my novel and find a way to completely restructure it. Perhaps I’m weird, but I’ve been holding on to this great packet of orange flashcards that I swiped once from a company I was teaching in, just knowing I could write scenes on them and rearrange them to create a novel. I pulled up my draft on Word and used one card to write a brief summary of each scene (and in the process discovered that about a quarter of the manuscript is bland, unnecessary description, with no action whatsoever and very little point).

Then I took these cards – about 80 in all – and went to work on the living room table. I scribbled notes on the cards, rearranged them, clipped some together, and so far have about a half-way version of a new structure. It would have been more, perhaps, if one of my feline friends hadn’t started “helping” me.