If you’re reading this post, then congratulations, you are one of the cool kids. You’re reading DeepGenre on the new server. Please go out and buy lottery tickets now while your luck holds.

If you’re not reading this post, congratulations, you are a paradox. Please have your cake and eat it too, and let us know if there’s a sound when a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it.

I’ve now gone ahead and done the same thing for MultiReal. You can now read online the first drafts of MultiReal’s chapter 1, along with footnotes and commentary about each draft. The big difference between the Infoquake drafts and the MultiReal drafts is this: for the latter book, there were thirty-five of them. Yes, thirty-five drafts of chapter 1. Told you I’m something of a perfectionist. (Keep in mind that most of these first drafts were simply rehashes of prior drafts, and most of them are incomplete.)

Instead of posting all thirty-five drafts up on my website, I’ve chosen to simply post the best or most representative samples of the eight different directions I tried. Along with the final published version, of course.

So among the abandoned concepts you can read about in these drafts are: Magan Kai Lee as ruthless martial arts expert (draft 1), a bureaucratic smackdown between rival governments about the weather (draft 17), Horvil fascinated by advertising (draft 18), and Henry Osterman trekking off to Harper’s Ferry to commit suicide (draft 29).

Quick excerpt from draft 29, my favorite abandoned version of chapter 1:

Henry Osterman was dying.

He stumbled into the provincial town of Harper on his own two feet, a pallid scarecrow of a man, his hair greasy, his clothes tattered, his fingernails curling in on themselves like shriveled worms after the rain.

Nobody could say how he had gotten there. The roads leading to Harper had been pulverized a quarter of a millennium ago by the wrath of thinking machines run amok. Tube trains and hoverbirds were technologies for a theoretical future when the world had learned to live without fossil fuels; multi and teleportation were the pipe dreams of lunatics. To get to Harper these days, you needed either a strong horse or a boat limber enough to steer through the debris clogging the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. Osterman had neither.

The city itself was barely worth the effort. A few dozen dilapidated buildings huddled together at the bottom of a hill, that was all. The more prosperous cities nearby had pieced together a fragile shell of trade from the shards of yesterday’s civilization, but so far Harper had little to contribute. Still, you could get three radio stations again in Harper, and sometimes on clear nights you could see the feeble blink of a Chinese satellite. The local music scene was bustling. Drinking water was almost drinkable. Progress.

Hopefully this will prove useful to writers looking for some insight into the process, if not for future scholars at the Edelman Studies departments of major universities worldwide.

(Originally published at David Louis Edelman’s personal blog. Feel free to comment here or there.)

How can I avoid that? How can I create fully-fledged, rich, three-dimensional, fat, happy characters with plenty of iron in their blood?

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Problem is, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much time and effort you spend, what you’re really doing when you create fictional characters is pure illusion. It’s mimicry. Writers in college who have just discovered Plato get hooked on the idea that characters already exist out there in some nebulous Elysian Fields of the mind, and all you have to do is channel them. But that’s simply not true, and it’s not a particularly helpful metaphor.

I think it’s more useful to think of the art of characterization as something akin to the art of additive sculpture. When you build a character, you’re not describing an existing personality so much as building one from the ground up. (Additive sculpture, my Art History major wife informs me, is the type where you pile up stuff to build your object, whereas subtractive sculpture is where you start with an existing hunk of something and chisel away the stuff you don’t need.) Just like with sculpture, when building characters you’ll often throw in materials that you’ve got lying around the shop. And just like with sculpture, your characters don’t have anything that you don’t explicitly put there yourself.

So okay, you’re asking yourself, if building characters is like creating sculpture, what ingredients do I need to add to the mix? Glad you asked. Here’s my list of things that good, full characters need. (And keep in mind that these are the ingredients for major characters in your story; minor characters don’t necessarily need such attention.)

1. Motivation. What do your characters want? Even the surly innkeeper who pops up for two paragraphs to serve the villain a plate of waffles has something on his mind. Whether spoken or unspoken, expressed or implied, characters should have plausible reasons for the actions they take. People shouldn’t just show up in your story and randomly do things that suit the plot you’re trying to construct. Every time your characters reach a decision point, don’t think about what you want your character to do in order to fulfill your expectations for the story; you should be asking yourself what your character would do at that point, based on what you know about them. If the action you want the character to take doesn’t suit the character, you’ve got two main options: a) figure out something else for the character to do that suits your plot, or b) backfill details earlier in your story to make the action suit the character.
2. Attitudes. A related but subtly different concept than motivation. If you’ve got a group of four main characters, how do all of the main characters relate to each one of the others? How does each character feel about the town they’re in, the situation they’ve ended up in, the object of their quest? Do they all agree about the urgency of what they’re doing? Is the tall guy with the scar always so quiet because he’s bored stiff, or fed up? The attitudes your characters have about their surroundings and their situation don’t need to be bold and dramatic on every page. Sometimes people just have an amiable indifference to what’s going on around them. But you as storyteller need to know and decide when your characters have that amiable indifference.
3. A character arc. In real life, people often go through life without changing. We make the same mistakes we made twenty years ago, and we curse ourselves for failing to learn from them. But the subject of story is change. You can’t have a story without something happening, and you make things happen in stories largely to show how your characters react. So if you’re going to spend any time focusing on a character, generally you’re going to want that character to grow or change in some way through the course of your story. This doesn’t mean you need to tie up every story with an Important Life Lesson™, and it doesn’t mean that every character needs to experience a life-changing epiphany by the time you hit the back cover. But if your characters don’t change in some fashion, your readers are going to wonder what the point of your story is.
4. A thematic purpose. Why did you decide to put this character in the story? You should have a reason for every character you’re going to put on paper. If you take the classic Star Wars trilogy, you’ll see that every major character serves a purpose vis-a-vis our protagonist, Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader represents what will happen to Luke if he continues down the path of anger and impetuosity; Leia stands for the home, family, and society he’s trying to defend; Han Solo represents the temptation to abandon community and responsibility; and so on. Often you don’t know the purpose of a character when they first leap through your fingers onto the keyboard, and you don’t necessarily need to map their utility on a Campbellian grid to know their purpose. A character’s purpose isn’t always a grand one either — after all, why do C-3PO and R2-D2 exist, except to provide comic relief and POV characters for certain crucial plot elements?
5. A sense of history. I would argue that people behave how they behave because of three main things: (a) genetics, (b) environment, and (c) experience. Han Solo didn’t spring into existence the moment Luke and Obi-Wan walked into the cantina. You could hear from that flinty Lucas dialogue that the man had been scarred from experience, that he’d had a few run-ins with the law, that this wasn’t the first time some old man had hired him to hustle his kid out of town in a hurry. You as the author should have some idea of the general contours of your characters’ lives, even if the bulk of it gets left on the cutting room floor, so to speak.
6. Quirks and mannerisms. Everyone has quirks, every single person who ever lived. Sprinkling some quasi-random idiosyncrasies on your characters helps readers build a unique-yet-consistent picture of them. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to fit absolutely everything about your character into some thematic template. Your heroine might have a nervous habit of scratching her ear, and that doesn’t have to tie in her deep-rooted ambivalence about the father who abandoned her thirty years ago. She might just have itchy ears.

There’s my list. Of course, you’ll want to take all of the above with a fist-sized hunk of salt, given that my two books to date have been accused of having characters that are two-dimensional, stereotyped — oh, all of the things listed in the first paragraph. I vigorously disagree, of course, but in the end that’s for you, the readers, to decide.

So what’s missing from the list?

* * *

(Photo of a sculptor named Brian Moneypenny taken from the website of Moneypenny Fine Arts.)

1) You’ll print that sucker out and add a title page. You’ll type up a page dedicating the book to your sister Chloë in Venice, whose steadfast support and witty observations helped you get through the tough parts, and who served as the inspiration for the character of Empress Fögelschmëer (the Younger). You’ll add a cover letter, mail the whole package off to Random House, and watch the royalty checks flow in. Or,

2) You’ll look at what you’ve written and realize it ain’t publishable.

Most writers — even the successful ones — fall into that second camp. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Months or even years will have passed since you started, and the world’s not the same place. You’re not the same person. So it’s only natural that the story has wandered onto unforeseen paths. It’s only natural you look back at those early chapters and shake your head and think, How naive that guy was who wrote this stuff.

Don’t despair. Here’s a path (my path) of getting from first draft to final draft. As before, keep in mind that your mileage may vary.

Step 8: Send the book off to your first readers. You need a small number of people who will agree to read your book and give you the unvarnished truth about it. This might be a writing group or a local book group or (most likely) a few select friends and family members. Try to choose people who are representative of your target audience, and who you trust not to just butter you up with useless flattery.

Tell your first readers you don’t need to know that you misspelled the word “pernicious” on pages 36 and 129; you need to know the answers to the broad questions. Does the book work? Are the characters sympathetic (or not sympathetic, as the case may be)? Is the book interesting, boring, confusing, amusing, intriguing? Assure them that you want The Truth and that you won’t take it personally if they don’t care for the book — as long as they tell you why.

Step 9: Read the book yourself from start to finish, and identify the problems. This is where your critical faculties as a reader come into play. Print the book out and pretend you’ve never heard of Empress Fögelschmëer (the Younger) or the Quest for the Glittering Orb of Mint Jelly. In fact, pretend that you’ve just picked this book up at random in the bookstore and you’re skeptical about the whole thing. Read the book over, and start taking notes.

Chances are, you’ll discover many of the flaws right away. Pacing is often the biggest culprit in first drafts: things happen too quickly, or not quickly enough, or in the wrong order. Characters do the things they do, and you won’t quite buy their motivations for doing them. Parts of the book might hang together just fine, but they don’t feel satisfying.

Step 10: Get your first readers’ feedback, and listen to it. This is the difficult part: you need to listen to your first readers. Really, really listen. You cannot argue with them. At all. They’re going to try to sugar-coat their criticisms, because they don’t want to make you angry or disappointed. And they’re going to be biased anyway, because they’re your friends and they probably share your worldview to a certain extent. So you need to very patiently coax the truth out of them, and let them do most of the talking.

If you did step 9 correctly, you’ll probably anticipate most of their criticisms. So you’re looking for two things: (1) validation of your conclusions from Step 9, and (2) consensus on things you missed in Step 9. Of course, not every criticism you get is worth following up on. But if three of your trusted first readers all tell you independently that it just doesn’t feel right for Aslan the King of Narnia to be a toad, it might be time to reevaluate some of your choices.

Step 11: Start writing your second draft from the beginning. This time around, don’t skip willy-nilly to whatever section suits your fancy at the moment. Start with a blank screen and a big “Chapter 1″ at the top, and proceed in order (as much as you can) until you hit “The End.” I usually have both the first draft and the second draft open, and I Alt+Tab between them as I write. I read a few sentences from draft 1, contemplate for a moment, Alt+Tab, and then type draft 2. Sometimes the sentences will be the same, sometimes they’ll be radically different, sometimes I’ll drift off and add whole new paragraphs.

Why start from the beginning this time and write in order? Because this time, you want to get into the flow of the novel. You want to be mindful of the transitions. You want to keep things like pacing and foreshadowing foremost on your mind. This time you know where the story’s going, and you know where it needs to go this chapter in order for the next chapter to work.

Step 12: Be ruthless, and don’t be afraid to make major changes. If you’re going to make any major changes to the novel, this is the time. Restructure things, change POVs, combine characters or get rid of them altogether. When in doubt, try hitting the Delete key. Don’t be afraid that the Muse will be so offended at your edits that she’ll pack up and abandon you entirely. (Besides which, who says you can’t recycle those excised passages in a later chapter, or a later book?)

One of the hardest things you’ll need to learn how to do is to let go of the troublesome parts of your book. All of your first readers will agree that it would be better if Frodo and Sam headed into Mordor without Clumsy Cousin Mungo, but even though you know they’re right, you absolutely love Clumsy Cousin Mungo, and you refuse to cut him out. I’m sorry, but sometimes you just have to give Clumsy Cousin Mungo the guillotine. Who said writing a novel was easy?

Step 13: Get serious about outlining as you go. By the time I’m well into my second draft, I’ve started constructing a very serious outline. For each chapter, I list the date that the action takes place, and then a two or three sentence synopsis of what happens in that chapter. And then I change the color of the text for each different point of view character. In MultiReal, I used black text for Natch, blue text for Jara, red text for Magan Kai Lee, and green text for any other points of view (such as a tertiary character or an omniscient POV).

Why do I go to all that trouble? It’s a good way to get a bird’s-eye view of the action. The color coding helps substantially, because I can glance through the outline and see that there’s a long spell in the middle of the book where character A disappears, or there’s too much of character B at one particular junction. Having the dates written down can be a lifesaver if you’ve got the type of book that’s time-sensitive. (It can also help you figure out what kind of weather to sprinkle into the background of the story.)

Step 14: Make decisions, and stick to them. Just like you have to commit to writing your novel, you need to get serious about making tough decisions in the writing of it. Can’t decide if your characters should act a certain way, or if you should use a certain point-of-view, or if you should include a particular scene? You’ll need to make these tough decisions at some point, and you’ll need to stick to them. You can’t keep vacillating the gender of your main character the whole way through, and you don’t want to dig through the book at the last minute to tease out all the inconsistencies. Decide.

When confronting tough decisions, it helps if you stop thinking of your choices as a shell game, where the “right” answer lies under one of your decisions. Every writing choice is the right choice, as long as you make it the right choice. There’s no Big English Professor in the Sky passing judgment on your work. Commit to a choice and make it work, and you’ll never go wrong.

Step 15: Go back to your first readers when the second draft is done. If you’ve listened carefully and done the hard work, you’ll hear comments like, “It’s like a completely different book!” And if you actually took some of the suggestions your readers gave you the first time around, they’re more likely to be forthcoming about their criticisms this time. Make sure you let your readers know that you’re heading into the home stretch. Tell them it’s too late to make any big alterations in the book at this point — because you made your commitments in step 14. Now you’re looking for inconsistencies, false notes, individual chapters that don’t work.

You might also want to expand your circle of readers at this point. Consider handing the book to people outside your immediate circle of trust. If you’re almost done, it should almost be ready for their consumption anyway, right?

Step 16: Print out your second draft and edit on paper from here on out. Most writers will tell you the same thing: compose your novel however you feel comfortable composing it, but you need to read the whole thing through on the printed page at some point. It’s hard to say why. The human brain seems to have different gears for typing and writing longhand, and you need to switch gears at this point.

Use a colored pen. Read carefully. Mark that puppy up, and don’t worry that you’re going to overdo it. The photograph you see here is a sample page from the fourth draft of my novel MultiReal. You don’t necessarily need to get that meticulous, of course, but if you feel the book still needs work, there’s nothing stopping you.

Step 17: Continue fine tuning until you reach the point of diminishing returns. There’s a common myth that writers don’t complete books, they just abandon them. But the reality is that you do reach that point of diminishing returns. You’ll never write an absolutely perfect book — there’s always one more comma to add, one more metaphor to tweak — but you will get to the point where you recognize that your obsessive tweaking isn’t improving the book.

How do you know when your book is done? That’s easy: when you can read it, start to finish, and be satisfied with every single paragraph. If you come across a chapter or a sentence you don’t like, rewrite it. If you still don’t like it, rewrite it again. Some chapters will only take two or three passes, but some chapters might require five or ten or even twenty rewrites.

Step 18: Finish when you finish. When do you type those magical words, “THE END”? When can you stop saying “I’m writing a novel” and start saying “I’ve written a novel”? Only you can know. You’re going to have to resist calls from well-meaning friends and relatives to “just send it in already” because “it’s good enough.” Guess what? It’s your book. You’re the only one who really knows when it’s good enough.

Congratulations, you’ve finished your novel. Now the real fun begins. The wonderful world of publishers, agents, editors, proofreaders, typesetters, book buyers, and Amazon reviewers awaits…

Since I’ve only written two novels to date — Infoquake and MultiReal — and am now in the midst of a third, I can’t say that this is always going to be my process. All I can say is that it’s worked for me twice now, and it seems to be doing just dandy the third time around.

More importantly, I can’t say whether this process will work for you. No two writers write the same way, and sometimes what works for one person will only trip up the next person. Life’s like that. You’ll need to adapt to your own unique circumstances as you see fit.

Here goes. How to write a novel:

Step 1: Come up with an amazing idea. Believe it or not, this is the easy part. Over my thirty-six years on this planet, I’ve thunk up a couple dozen incredible ideas for novels. Really. Shakespeare, Kafka, and Steinbeck are all huddling together in the afterlife praying I get a chance to explore some of these stories before I kick the bucket. Sometimes the ideas are just simple juxtapositions, sometimes they’re extrapolations of life experiences, sometimes they’re twists on existing stories. Sometimes they’re just hazy impressions.

Great ideas aren’t quite a dime a dozen, but you can definitely find them on the discount rack in Wal-Mart. All it takes to come up with a great idea is confidence, imagination, and a certain unique perspective on the world. That’s it. I’m willing to bet that you — yes, you — have plenty of ideas for great novels inside you.

Step 2: Noodle around and figure out if your idea is novel-worthy. I said that coming up with an idea was the easy part. Your first real challenge is to explore that idea to see if it’s worthy of spending a year or two of your life on. This is not a light decision to make. These characters are going to set up camp in your dreams, they’re going to pop out at you from the side of the road while you’re driving. You’re going to find yourself standing in a 7-11 wondering which flavor of Slurpee your protagonist would choose and how they would pay for it (corporate credit card? cash from wad in pocket? five finger discount?). You need to know if you can live with these people.

How do you noodle around to figure out if your idea is novel-worthy? Well, just start writing. Explore. Go wild. Improvise. Doodle. Daydream. Don’t worry about whether you’re writing the beginning or the end or some passage in the middle that will never make the final cut. If the book explodes under your fingertips, and you’re all a-twitter with logistical, ethical, and epistemological questions about your idea, that’s a good sign. If you reach page 10 and discover you’ve got nothing left to say, that’s an indication that your idea isn’t novel-worthy. It might be short story-worthy, or it might be novel-worthy for someone else – but if it’s not for you, don’t force it. Move on.

Step 3: Commit. This is the crucial step. You need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and say, “Damn it, I’m writing this novel. The whole frickin’ thing. I don’t care if my spouse thinks I’m loony and people snicker at me when I walk into Starbucks with my laptop. Even if it never, ever gets published, I’m still going to write this novel. There’s a very good chance that it’ll sink like a stone even if it does get published, and the critics will completely ignore it or call me nasty names. I’ll probably never, ever make any money off it. But I don’t care.”

Sometimes it helps to tie that commitment to something tangible. Clear yourself a room or a part of a room to use as Your Writing Space. Take a couple days off work. When I decided to write Infoquake, I quit my job and bought a new laptop. (A cheap one.) (On credit.) Believe it or not, buying that laptop helped, because I kept looking at it and telling myself, Dude, you better make sure you didn’t waste your money.

Of course, there are all kinds of perils involved in making any commitment. You need to believe you’re committing to something worthwhile, you need to have the time to devote to making it work, and you need to be able to stick through the rough times. You need to make sure you’re not committing to too many things at once.

Step 4: Start banging out a first draft. You’ve got a novel-worthy idea, and you’re committed to fleshing it out. So go do it already. Don’t know where to start? Don’t know which character to focus on, or whether you want to set your story on a fire planet, an ice planet, or a mud planet? No need to panic. Just try one. You don’t need to have a fully developed outline or even a half-developed one before you start. The important thing is just to get yourself moving in any direction.

Keep in mind that nobody is going to see your first drafts but you, so it doesn’t matter if you have to run through an entire solar system of planets, moons, asteroids, and floating geodesic domes before you hit on the right one. You may find yourself chasing a lot of dead ends, pursuing a lot of ideas that lead nowhere. That’s okay, that’s all part of the process.

Step 5: Structure as you go. Some writers can zip through a draft of a novel by the seat of their pants. Others diligently outline every step their character’s going to take over the next hundred thousand words. It’s likely your process will fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Regardless, you need to have some idea of structure if you expect your novel to work. You might not know what that structure is when you start, and you might change it drastically as you go, but you can’t just expect Frodo and Sam to wander to Mount Doom by themselves. Either they’ll wander around aimlessly or they’ll wind up at the Cracks of Doom at the end of chapter 3, and then your novel will be in big trouble.

I find it easiest to start with a broad structure and increasingly fine-tune in smaller and smaller increments as I go. For instance: you know where your protagonist starts the novel, and you know where she’s going to end up. You’ve got a general idea of the trials and tribulations she’ll face along the way. So break up the book into three to five acts, and map out where she’s going to be physically and emotionally at the beginning and the end of each act.

Step 6: Persevere. Many young writers get the idea in college that the Muse is supposed to beam you perfectly formed sentences that will just flow from your fingertips in a demonic burst of inspiration at 2 a.m. And this does happen, sometimes. But the Muse doesn’t parse out these perfectly formed sentences often, and she expects you to fill in the gaps yourself.

One of the most important skills every writer has to learn is the ability to keep writing even when you don’t feel that tingle of inspiration. Sometimes you just need to plod through, get from point A to B. There are a lot of footsteps between the Shire and Mount Doom, and occasionally you’re going to just trip or stumble along. Often you’ll find that after you’ve trudged for a while, you’ll stumble on a sudden idea or inspiration that will make that passage light on its feet. Other times, you just have to keep trudging.

Step 7: Get that first draft done, by hook or by crook. There’s no law that says you need to write your novel in order; skip around if you need to. I find that I’ll get interested in certain two- or three-chapter segments at a time from all over the book. I’ll start writing those and poop out along the way, stopping when I get interested in another section of the book. Sometimes when I come back to those chapters that were giving me such difficulty a month ago, I’ve figured out something along the way that makes the writing easier.

But regardless, by the time I’m 85% of the way to the first draft finish line, I’m cutting corners. I’m taking shortcuts and throwing in sloppy bridging scenes. I’m starting to doubt the whole enterprise, and I’ve already tossed aside many of the ideas that framed the whole thing in the first place. But at some point, I can sit back, print out a big stack of paper, and pat myself on the back for having finished my first draft.

Congratulations! You’ve finished the first draft of your novel. And now, the fun begins (as I’ll elaborate on part 2 of this article).

Update 1/21/08: Here’s part 2.

Update 1:25 PM: Well, that was quick. We’re all upgraded to the latest WordPress, and the hacked code is gone. For the irretrievably curious, we got hit with this. Everything seems to be back to normal, but if you do see something amiss, please email me.

But at the moment, I’m more concerned about the content of the sites than their visual presentation. And so I’m evaluating lots of author websites to see just what works and what doesn’t.

Today I was poking around the website for Brandon Sanderson, author of Elantris and Mistborn. Careers in the science fiction and fantasy world don’t start much better than Brandon’s. You may have heard recently that he’s been hired to finish off Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, which is kind of the fantasy novelist equivalent of being asked to pinch hit for Mickey Mantle in the bottom of the ninth. I started digging through Brandon’s website and discovered a massive amount of chapter annotations for his debut novel Elantris. Go ahead, poke around yourself — these annotations are detailed. Obviously a lot of thought went into this.

So my question today is this: what do you find useful on an author’s website? I think we can all agree that excerpts help, and at the very least, having a blog doesn’t hurt. But what about the rest? Do you read additional material like chapter annotations, deleted scenes, and first drafts? Do you actually refer to online glossaries and the like? Does this stuff make you more likely to buy the author’s work? (And when you do buy her work, do you appreciate having lots of links to bookstores that carry it?)

If possible, name an author website that’s directly influenced you to buy that author’s work, and why.

I’m not just talking about the difference between fiction and non-fiction. I’m talking about the very idea of storytelling itself. It’s an art form, which means it’s a product of the human intellect, which means it doesn’t exist naturally in the world.

Sometimes readers get so heavily focused on plot mechanics that they mistake the plot — which is simply one element of the art, albeit a crucial one — for the story itself. What happens at the end of the Jump 225 trilogy? they ask me, as if that’s the only question worth asking. Let’s say I tell you what happens at the end: Natch vanquishes his enemies and learns to live in peace with himself. Or, Natch dies heroically. Or, Natch and his enemies join forces to take on a different enemy altogether. You know the broad strokes of any ending I could possibly think up, and you’ve seen them all a million times before. So obviously the important question is not what happens at the end of the story, but why and how.

I just watched Batman Begins for the umpteenth-plus-oneth time the other night. Spoiler alert: Batman defeats Ra’s al Ghul. He chats with Lieutenant Gordon at the end, only to discover that there’s a new villain named the Joker out there causing trouble. Roll credits.

So what happens after the cameras stop rolling? We assume that Batman goes on to defeat the Joker (and indeed, we’ll find out next summer when The Dark Knight hits theaters). And then he defeats another villain, and then another, and then another, until Bruce Wayne dies in battle, hangs up the cape, or hands the keys to the Batmobile down to the next guy in line. We can safely assume that Batman will never completely succeed in vanquishing crime, that there are certain villains that will always elude his grasp.

If you were to stand back at the end of Bruce Wayne’s life and try to chronicle it from the beginning, chances are that his balance sheet will show a number of defeats alongside his victories. How often does Batman defeat the Joker, and how often is the Dark Knight thwarted by him? Well, let’s be charitable and say that Bruce collars the bad guys more often than they elude him. If that’s the case, why chop up the narrative the way we normally do — starting from stasis, going to crisis, ending in victory? Couldn’t we just as easily tell a series of Batman stories the other way around, where we begin with him triumphantly nabbing the Joker and end with the Joker escaping and creating more murder and mayhem?

If we took the naturalistic approach, narrating events as they “really” happened, certainly we’d have to take a more nuanced view of who the central character is in this saga and how successful his life of crime-fighting really is. If you wanted to narrate the “real” life of Bruce Wayne, if you wanted to know what really happened, you’d have to include all sorts of information about the kind of food he eats, how he pays his taxes, what his doctor has to say about his ulcers, etc. I mean, no human being has the energy to fight crime for more than a few hours a night, right? How does Batman fill the other 20 hours of the day?

But we don’t tell stories from a naturalistic perspective. We might try to simulate nature’s point of view or use it as a tool in our own story-telling, but by and large we construct an artificial framework on which to hang our stories. We have a point of view. The protagonist’s experiences are filtered through a set of moral questions or psychological dilemmas. We focus on Batman’s efforts to stop the Joker from poisoning Gotham’s water supply rather than the audit of his 2003 taxes because it’s a convenient metaphor. Can Batman overcome his feelings of despair and hopelessness to face a challenge? Will Batman press ahead against overwhelming odds when it’s very likely he’s going to fail anyway? Does Batman believe that he’s fulfilling his mission to act as an instrument of justice? And so on.

When does the story end? It ends when the moral or ethical or psychological question is answered, whether in the affirmative or in the negative or some combination of both. Bruce Wayne finds the strength to put on the mask one more time. Bruce Wayne chooses to follow his convictions, even though they clash with society’s. Bruce Wayne perseveres when a lesser man would have given up. Whether he actually succeeds in capturing the Joker or not is of secondary concern.

So as I plan to wrap up the Jump 225 trilogy, I have to go back to the primary questions facing these characters since the beginning. For our main protagonist Natch, the question is whether he can reconcile his extreme selfishness with the dictates of society — and whether he should. For our secondary protagonist Jara, the question is whether she can overcome her self-loathing and become an actualized person capable of taking control of her own life. These are the questions that have been facing Natch and Jara since the very first page of Infoquake, and all of the plot that happens in Infoquake, MultiReal, and Geosynchron is in service to answering those key questions.

How will the Jump 225 trilogy end? It will end with a resolution of these key questions. Spoiler alert: the answers are yes and yes. Why and how are these questions answered? That you’ll have to read the books to find out.

1. Eliminate unnecessary modifiers. When I say unnecessary modifiers, I’m talking about both “weasel” words that lessen the impact of your prose and useless modifiers that emphasize for no reason. Words like possibly, simply, really, totally, very, supposedly, seriously, terribly, allegedly, utterly, sort of, kind of, usually, extremely, almost, mostly, practically, probably, and quite. Why write “It was quite hot out that day” or “It was extremely hot that day” when the sentence “It was hot that day” accomplishes the same thing? The more clutter you can get rid of, the better your sentences will be.

2. Eliminate clichés. What’s a cliché? A cliché is any phrase so commonplace the reader speeds right past it without even realizing they’ve done so. The metaphor is wasted. When you say someone’s scraping the bottom of the barrel, do you actually picture someone scraping the bottom of a barrel? When someone’s monkeying around or driving like a maniac, do you actually think of monkeys or drooling lunatics? Better to have plain, unadorned prose than prose filled with clichés. This doesn’t mean you need to strike out every last familiar phrase from your manuscript; you just need to be conscious of what each word in your story is doing. Microsoft Word’s grammar checker has a helpful feature that will automatically underline clichés with a green squiggly line. Give it a try.

3. Eliminate repeated words and phrases. I’m not just talking about redundant phrases that are redundant. In going through my book, I discovered my characters were rasping things every two pages. A certain character was constantly described as panther-like. And every time people stopped to think, they would “fold their arms before their chest” or “roll their eyes.” Use your word processor’s search function to hunt these repeated phrases down, then use the thesaurus to find replacements. They don’t have to be fancy words, just different ones. My rule of thumb is that really striking words shouldn’t be repeated at all within the same chapter, and only repeated a few times in the same book. For more common words and phrases, just make sure they’re not repeated too close together.

4. Search for extraneous thats and hads. Perhaps this is just a shortcoming of my own prose, but I’ve noticed that I tend to stick in way too many thats and hads. Quick example: “He had been talking about how he had needed to get new glasses” could be phrased better as “He talked about how he needed new glasses,” or even “He talked about needing new glasses.” That often sneaks in between clauses in a sentence when it’s not really needed. “I knew that I was robbed” can be tweaked down to “I knew I was robbed.” (Often this is a function of choosing a better tense; see #9 below.)

5. Straighten out your mixed metaphors. Jumbling metaphors together in a big stew of words is my Achilles’ heel. I actually like the effect that comes from clobbering the reader with a smorgasbord of different metaphors. But you have to know when to stick to your guns and when to cool it. If you’re riddled with doubt about a particular sentence, try treating every word absolutely literally to see if the sentence pans out. Make sure you’re conscious of every metaphor in your prose; they shouldn’t slip in there unbidden.

6. Look up any word you’re not positive you know. I don’t care if that word only has one syllable and your eight-year-old kid uses it every day. You absolutely need to know what every word in your story means (and you need to make sure you’ve spelled it correctly). There are free online dictionaries aplenty, not to mention Google, so you have no excuse for using words improperly.

7. Use that thesaurus. Some writing experts will tell you the thesaurus is a dangerous tool. Phooey. Find a thesaurus you’re comfortable with, whether it be paper-based or CD-based or online-based, and use that sucker. That doesn’t mean you need to start throwing obscure words into the text where they don’t belong; as a general rule, you should only use words you were already familiar with anyway. (See #6 above.) If you’re writing about a baseball game, your players can’t always throw the ball every time. They need to toss, hurl, lob, pitch, fling, and even fire off that ball too. Once in a while, they might actually catapult, flick, or chuck it.

8. When in doubt, try the Delete key. Sometimes I’ll find myself stuck on a particular sentence I can’t quite wrestle into submission. I’ll scan through the thesaurus, I’ll rearrange the words half a dozen different ways, and it still doesn’t work. Then I’ll just start hitting the delete button and suddenly, like magic, the whole thing comes together. Don’t get so attached to any particular piece of prose that you’re blinded to its shortcomings. Sometimes the perfect sentence can be used in the wrong place, and you need to be able to slice it out if necessary.

9. Try changing tenses. It’s very easy to slip into certain tenses that needlessly complicate your prose. Tenses like the past progressive (“I was doing something”) and the present perfect (“He has done this forever”) tend to get very confusing very quickly. You can’t always avoid the more complicated tenses, but the less you use of them the better. See if you can switch the scene/sentence/paragraph to simple past instead (“I did something”). Consult this handy Verb Tense Chart from the Purdue University Online Writing Lab. Perfect example: the original version of the first sentence on this page. Originally it read, “Having just completed revising the manuscript for my second novel, I’ve got line editing on the brain at the moment.”

10. Rewrite, rephrase, reconfigure. Unfortunately, despite the Romantic picture many of us have of the writing process, prose does not just flow down from the Muse and magically burst through your fingertips. Even the best artists need to constantly rework and revise what they’ve written. It’s work. Of course, for most of us writers it’s fun work. But just because you’re an artist doesn’t mean that you don’t have to worry about your craft. Piano players practice scales, painters make preliminary sketches, and writers go through lots of drafts. That’s just how the process works. If you want to know the most important lesson I’ve learned about making art, it’s this: the stuff that looks the easiest is usually the hardest to pull off. Jackson Pollock? Raymond Carver? Ernest Hemingway? Andy Warhol? These dudes worked their asses off to put together works of art that look effortless.