Fleischman, like all highly competent writers, works hard to produce a style that meets his high, professional standards.

When he was younger, he would often write whole chapters in a day; now he regards a paragraph a good day's work. In college he tried to write sentences in imitation of Henry James. Writing these sentences was too much like "pulling taffy," so he began using Ernest Hemingway's deceptively simple style as a model instead.

Since fiction writing wasn't part of the curriculum when Fleischman attended San Diego State College, he went to the library stacks as he had when he was a student of magic. But the existing books on story writing were not exactly what he felt he needed.

The books did not tell him how to make a plot. "The trouble is every time you write page one you face a new wild set...