One theme that runs through mythology is the amazing fecundity of the gods—the world seems half-populated by their bastards. While a few of these are rapes (in the old sense of “carrying off” the human female, whether the sex turned out to be consensual or not), it’s also a fact of human life that there are certain women who are irresistibly drawn to powerful males. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. This is not true for all women, or for all powerful people. But Danny North would not have to look like a young George Clooney or Robert Redford in order to attract the notice—let alone the eager desire—of a certain contingent of young women. His power, his intelligence, and, I must add, his innate goodness would make him desirable to many girls, for reasons as various as the girls themselves.

The result was that my original outline for this book is now an amusing cast-off; that which survives from it will be in the third volume, while most of what’s valuable in this book was not in the outline. Stories are invented as you go along, if you’re writing them properly, and that means that characters and situations that come out of nowhere can blossom into productive mines that bring out tramloads of metal-rich ore. My skill as a refiner is a different issue. But I think the ore I smelted to make this book is of a much finer metal than what I originally planned.

How can we tell, though? The earlier version was never written, not a word of it. It existed in my head, so I think of it as real; but no graduate student will ever pore over the differences between drafts, because the book you just read is the only draft that actually hit the paper.

How do you unfold the tale in an order which will be clear and interesting to readers who obviously begin the book knowing almost nothing about the story, and must end it understanding all? I regard it as the essence of good structure that all the key information will have been presented earlier in the book, so when you move through the climactic scenes at the end, everything is already clear to the reader, because it was so well explained earlier on. This means that the exposition is front-loaded. But readers won’t tolerate (nor should they) a story that begins with nothing but exposition.

The device that works best is for the point-of-view character to know little more than the reader does. Thus when the viewpoint character learns it, so does the reader.