Remember the scene in Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. where E.T. assembles a transmitting device from the junk he pulls out of the garage? There’s an umbrella, a floor lamp, pots and pans, a record player—it’s been a long time since I saw the movie, so I can’t recall everything, but he manages to throw all those household items together in such a way that the contraption works well enough to communicate with his home planet thousands of light years away. I got a big kick out of that scene when I saw it in the movie theater, but it strikes me now that putting together a good novel is much the same
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