When I say a device, I am generally talking about the necessary tricks that we come up with as means to tell a story.
Um, for example, in my own work from Watchmen, uh, a very simple early device that I worked out was that scene changes could be accomplished by an overlap of dialogue, by an overlap of imagery, even by an overlap of a colour between one scene and the next.
This is a device.
It carries the reader through the changes in the narrative at a furious pace, and it's aesthetically pleasing.
Of course, you will learn things in doing any work, and you should retain that learning, that you can do this effect, that you can do such and such a device.
But it is important to just keep moving fast in evolving these things.
