Taking off from The Creative Writer's Survival Guide, John McNally's relentlessly blunt, bracingly cheerful, and immensely helpful map to being a writer, Vivid and Continuous is an equally blunt, cheerful, and helpful map to learning to be a writer. While acknowledging that many fine books cover such essentials of fiction writing as point of view, characterisation, and setting, McNally sets out in this new book to solve the tricky second-tier problems that those books cover only in footnotes.