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Orson Scott Card is the New York Times best-selling author of Ender's Game, The Tales of Alvin Maker, the Homecoming series, and many more. Ender's Game and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the first and only author to win both of those prestigious awards in consecutive years for a novel and its sequel. In fact, Orson Scott Card has received a total of 12 Hugo nominations and 3 wins, 7 Nebula nominations and 2 wins, plus the John W. Campbell award, the World Fantasy award, Margaret A. Edwards Award, the Whitney Lifetime Achievement Award, several Locus awards, and 3 nominations for the Mythopoeic fantasy award.
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This episode originally aired on 11/12/2009 with the following authors:
Note: The following interview has been transcribed from The Author Hour radio show. Please excuse any typos, spelling and gramatical errors.
Interview with Orson Scott Card | | |
Bonus Question(s) that Didn't Air on the Live Radio Show
Note that you can also listen to this while you read it.
Matthew Peterson:
Let me ask you a quick bonus question here. I know you do teach. You’ve written a couple self-help books like Characters and View Point and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. What is some of the most important advice you give your students?
Orson Scott Card:
The most important advice is just write your brains out. You learn more from writing, even a very bad novel, than you do from any number of writing classes. Just putting out the words teaches you. And so I often tell people who come to my writing class, I ask, “Why are you here? What do you think you’re going to get that you wouldn’t get by staying at home and just writing like crazy?” And especially college students. You know, they say, “What should I major in to prepare to be a writer?” I say, “Well, major in dishwashing at a restaurant. Major in general studies. Major in something that will give you a paying job.” Whatever other interests you have. But there’s no course in writing that will help you become a writer. Period. Not even the ones I teach.
Now, I’d like to think that my stuff is useful. But still, what you have to do is just write and write and write. But, while you’re doing it, you have to write intelligently. It’s not useful if you just love everything you produce yourself. You have to then re-read it critically, you have to understand, from the story, what is and isn’t working. You have to learn from it. And you don’t learn from it by asking other people’s opinions. You learn from it by letting it sit for a while and coming back to it yourself. ‘Cause other people’s opinions are only going to tell you what they expect or what they would have written, or what their English teachers taught them to expect in fiction. In other words, useless crap.
And what you need as a writer, is your own eyes to help you see where the differences are between the story that you’ve written and the story that you wish you had written. That’s where you do your learning.
Matthew Peterson:
I like what you said, you know, publishers are kind of funny and like you said in the main interview, they’re kind of funny, they don’t want to publish something unless it’s been written. [laughs] So, you gotta write.
Orson Scott Card:
I mean, how many writers are there who say, “I’m going to write a novel someday.” That just makes me sad, because of course, they’re not. Again, I tell them, the college students, if you want to be a writer, why aren’t you writing? What are you doing in this class? Why are you doing this? Why are you in college? If you have another agenda in college, great, but if you’re here to learn how to write, what a waste of your time. You should be writing.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah.
Orson Scott Card:
While I was in college, I had a professor who mocked me for saying it. He said once, “Well, Card you’re going to be a writer, right?” And I said, “No, no, I AM a writer.” ‘Cause I was. I was producing plays at quite a rapid pace; those plays were getting produced on the main stage at the university. I was working. I wasn’t getting a lot of money, but I was working as a writer and taking myself and my work very seriously and I was learning. I got a better education than any of the writing students who just took the class. Because I continued working my brains out as a writer even after the class was over.
Matthew Peterson:
Well, I think that’s excellent advice. That’s advice I need to take myself because sometimes I get too busy with life.
Orson Scott Card:
Well, you know, and when you’re making a living, especially if you have a family to support, you’ve gotta put that first. You have to or you’re not a very good person. But having said that, at the same time, you will always find time if you actually want to be a writer. You’ll always find time.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah. Thank you for that advice. Let me ask you one more question. I really did want to ask this question. This is kind of a personal question. Like Stephenie Meyer, it’s no secret that you’re an active Mormon. You went on an unpaid mission to Brazil. I was just wondering, how have your religious beliefs affected your writing and your career?
Orson Scott Card:
Well, in one sense, as little as possible, because I recognized right away, when I first started writing science fiction that the requirement of science fiction is that God’s not a character, that people do not pray and get answers, etc., because that becomes religious fiction, affirming a particular religion. The odd thing is when you don’t have a particular god in your fiction, then science fiction can become the best religious fiction, because you can deal with all the issues without dealing with any particular sect. So I have guarded that very carefully.
I sometimes use Mormonism culturally in fiction, as in my Folk of the Fringe stories. In that the characters were Mormons, but I had never ever written a fiction, even my religious fiction, that requires the reader to decide whether they believe in order to accept the characters. In other words, I don’t want it to be that they have to be a committed believer in the religion in order to accept or care about the story. So in that sense, I have made very sure that my religion does not impinge on my fiction any more than . . . nobody reading Stephanie Meyer is going to come away and say, “You know, I want to be a Mormon too.”
Matthew Peterson:
[laughs] Yeah.
Orson Scott Card:
It is not going to happen. Now have there been people who have been led to believe in the Church initially because of my work? Yes, but not because of my work. They knew that I was a Mormon, and that made some people, certainly by no means a lot of people even, made some people think, “Well, if he believes that, maybe there’s something to it.” And that’s great. I’m perfectly happy with that. But nobody will learn church doctrine from my books. Nobody will have a little form at the end of the book that they can fill out and call the missionaries to come. ‘Cause that’s not my job.
Part of my thinking on this is that first of all, what converts people is not the content of a book. Fiction is terribly ill suited because we admit at the beginning that it’s all lies. So why in the world would I want to tell you a very specific truth that I believe in, in fictional form? If I want to tell you that kind of truth, I’ll write an essay. And I write plenty of essays. People have no doubt of my opinion, though people have a tendency to take one tiny shred of one of my opinions and assume that I believe everything else that you’re supposed to believe if you’re in that pigeon hole. Of course I don’t, I’m an equal opportunity offender.
Matthew Peterson:
[laughs]
Orson Scott Card:
And so my beliefs tend to cover quite a range. But, you know, I write a column for Mormon Times, which is a publication of Deseret News, a newspaper in Salt Lake City owned by the Church, and in that column, I candidly speak to Mormons about Mormon things, and there’s no doubting what I believe there. But in my fiction, I do my very best to keep that out of the picture.
Now, I’m answering this at too great of length. There is the fact that I’m a true believer in my religion and, therefore, even when I’m not paying attention, or even when I’m trying not to, some of my beliefs that are exactly like the official church doctrines are going to show up in my fiction, unconsciously, because you can’t tell a story without your beliefs and your world view emerging. But it’s not proselytizing there; it’s simply inviting you into the author’s mind, the way that any other author does. You know, an atheist will invite you into his world view in his fiction, and he is no more preaching his faith than I am. When without deliberate design, who I am emerges in my fiction. You always confess who you are, and who I am is, in fact, to my great relief actually, a believing Mormon. So that even things that I’m paying attention to, that I’m not aware I chose, confess my faith. Can’t help that. It’s just going to be there.
It’s what C. S. Lewis says, everybody takes Narnia as allegory. Certainly by the end he’s doing allegorical things. You know, he does the end of the world, he does the creation, but when he started, he truly had no such plan. He was writing a children’s book and he had the image of a fawn and a street lamp. A fawn in the snow carrying a package, passing a street lamp in the woods. And that was it. He had no idea what that image was about. He had no plan. He just started telling the story. And the story was moving along alright, but he really didn’t know what he had until all of a sudden a lion came into it. And he resisted any idea that the lion stood for Christ. He said, the lion doesn’t stand for Christ; the lion is Christ in this world. In other words, he’s not writing allegory; he’s writing a world in which there is a savior.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah.
Orson Scott Card:
And it’s a very different project. Well, nothing I have written is remotely as allegorically Christian, inadvertently though, as Narnia, but still the things I believe are going to show up.
Matthew Peterson:
And you do have some Christian based books, like the Women of Genesis, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.
Orson Scott Card:
I’d like to think that they’re. . . I would rather say they are Bible based. Because, for example, Sarah, is my only book that’s been translated into Turkish; it’s a Muslim country.
Matthew Peterson:
Oh that is true, because they are . . .
Orson Scott Card:
I got good reviews from the Jerusalem Review for Sarah and Rebecca and so forth. What I am doing is writing historical novels, and because I’m writing from the point of view of the women and not the official prophets, I never have to make my reader decide whether they believe it or not. In other words, I never actually show an angel appearing. We never actually have the transcendental events. Instead, what we have is the woman who was told about them by her husband and what she believes about her husband. Very different fictional project. And it means that you can be a complete unbeliever and read these books and find great value in them, I think.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah. And let me back track, you don’t have to be Christian, because Genesis is the first book in the Bible and that’s the first book in the Old Testament, and there’s lots of different faiths, not Christian, that believe in Genesis or use a variation of Genesis. So, yeah, the creation of the world, and all that. Well, that is so interesting. I’m glad I was able to talk to you.
Extra Material That was Cut from the Show Because of Time Constraints
Note that you can also listen to this while you read it (you'll need to fast forward past the bonus questions).
Orson Scott Card:
[regarding when the next Ender’s book will come out] So, I have no idea when. I didn’t realize that I was going to be writing the Hidden Empire, the book that’s coming out in December. That was the book that came out. I had another book that I should have written first, in fact. It’s ready to write. I’m going to be turning it in probably in May. But, you know, the book that’s right is the one you can write.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah. And there are other things that we can read while we’re waiting for the other Ender’s book, ‘cause like you said, you’ve got some other books. I mean there’s even The Authorized Ender Companion. There’s a graphic novel also.
Orson Scott Card:
I’m really proud of what Marvel has been doing with that. I could not believe my good fortune in having people who understood the Ender books as well as they did and who gave such fine treatment to them. You know, book adaptations don’t sell like the original super hero comics do, but they have been unstinting in their attention to quality in these books. And so I’m thrilled with the results that we’re getting.
Matthew Peterson:
I’ve never really gotten into graphic novels, but your Ender’s Game was amazing. You know, amazing artwork, and it definitely stayed with the story.
Orson Scott Card:
They were actually more faithful than any of the adaptations written by screen writers, other than myself.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah.
Orson Scott Card:
They actually treated the material with respect. There were changes they had to make, you know, to make it work and things they had to omit.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah. It’s much shorter.
Orson Scott Card:
For example, it doesn’t actually take us through the last chapter, but all of that’s going to be covered in the adaptation of Ender in Exile, so I’m not worried.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah, yeah. And speaking of screen plays, I know this is kind of like a long, long process. You’re trying to get Ender’s Game into a movie. What’s the latest news on that?
Orson Scott Card:
Well, you know, we are with a company, Odd Lot Entertainment, that is committed to doing Ender’s Game, not faithfully in the sense of scene for scene, ‘cause that would be a five hour movie, and you can’t do that. But one that wants to have it done right, that is true to the story and true to the moral meaning of the story, which, you know, is neither pro nor anti war; it’s just pro soldier. It’s an entirely different thing and the struggles of what it takes to be a leader, what it takes to achieve anything in life. And they are committed to making the movie that the readers will be delighted with.
The trouble is: getting Hollywood to fund it. Because when you start talking about budgets the size of science fiction film budgets, they want it all to be, well, like Iron Man, which was a wonderful movie. But it was all action, all tension, there was no room for a character to develop. And so the character consisted of Robert Downey Jr. being charming, which was quite enough for that movie. It needed no more than that. But Ender’s Game requires that we have not just one but a half dozen excellent child actors. Now, when has that ever happened in the history of film? Well, once: the live action Peter Pan of a few years ago. It got good performances from several child actors at once. But it’s rare and it’s going to require a special director. We have one. I do not control publicity, so I can’t tell you who it is. But he’s somebody who is, in his own life story, very attuned to Ender’s Game and is a man of great talent, who I believe will. . . He’s adapting my script, my latest script, which came close to being what we needed, and he’s doing his own pass through that script right now as we speak. And we’re looking forward to being able to go out to seek the other half of . . . we have it half funded now . . . to seek the other half of the funding in the next 3 or 4 months. Let’s put it this way, I think that not only has the actor who will play Ender been born, I think he’s already in grade school.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah.
Orson Scott Card:
So, I think we’re that close.
Matthew Peterson:
Oh good. You know, once things start rolling . . . it’s one of those things where you have to just jump on and do it, because those actors are going to get older. And it’s very time sensitive.
Orson Scott Card:
Well, and that’s the problem, you know, how do we film any of the sequels? The answer is, who knows? We’d have to change casts.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah. You kind of do like a Lord of the Rings thing where you just do them all at the same time.
Orson Scott Card:
Well, we’re not doing that. So, if there are sequels it will be with a new cast each time.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah. And that’s still fine, I mean, that still works too. You never know . . .
Orson Scott Card:
Well, I don’t know. I mean, imagine the Harry Potter films if you’d not had Daniel Radcliff all the times.
Matthew Peterson:
Get a different Harry. Yeah, I know we got different characters from movie to movie, you know, some of them switched over, one of them died, but yeah, the main characters, yeah . . .
Orson Scott Card:
Wasn’t that inconvenient of Richard Harris? I mean, how thoughtless of him!
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah!
Orson Scott Card:
If he’d known he was going to die, he shouldn’t have signed on in the first place.
Matthew Peterson:
What’s he doing? Yeah. [laughs]
Orson Scott Card:
The funny thing is there are people who hate . . . now I can’t remember the new actor’s name [Michael Gambon] . . . uh . . he’s actually a better actor than Richard Harris ever was.
Matthew Peterson:
He’s very good.
Orson Scott Card:
He’s not a better performer. And so, Richard Harris was right for the early books, because in the early books, J. K. Rowling used Dumbledore as kind of a humorous, Merlin-esque, like Merlin from T. H. White’s Once and Future King, a kind of a jokey character. But as he became more grim, to put it plainly, I think the replacement actor was much better suited. I don’t see Richard Harris having been able to bring that off. So, while I regret his death, I certainly . . . you don’t want to re-cast through funerals, I think that all in all, the series was not ill-served by the way that things worked out.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah. I heard that the first one, Richard, I heard that he wasn’t going to do it. He had never heard of this Harry Potter thing. And one of his grand-daughters or something like that said, “I will kill you if you don’t do it.” [laughs]
Orson Scott Card:
Well, I mean, that’s the funny thing. I keep hearing that sort of thing about Ender’s Game from studio executives and so forth, that they say, “Well, you know, I had no idea what this was. When I mentioned that I was looking at this project and my nephew or my son or my daughter,” or you know, whatever, “just went ape. And I thought good heavens! Why haven’t I heard of this.” So, I have no idea why so many young readers have embraced Ender’s Game. I did not intend it as a children’s book. It’s . . . no way is it a children’s book. I make no concessions in vocabulary or the sometimes cruelty of what happened. And the moral reasoning is complicated, and yet even the youngest readers seem to master it and understand it. So, it encourages me about the intellectual qualities of the very young. But it also makes me feel like Ender’s Game touched in something that I certainly could not have planned. And that’s a very encouraging thing for a writer.
Matthew Peterson:
This episode is really the classic fiction and fantasy. And [Ender’s Game] really has become a modern day classic. In my book, it has.
Orson Scott Card:
I appreciate that, it certainly is . . . if I could do it every time, believe me, I would.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah. Well, it’s hard to re-do a classic every year.
Orson Scott Card:
But wouldn’t it be lovely if every single thing . . . you know I look at Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer Detective. So you know, I feel pretty good if not everything I write is Huckleberry Finn. And Charles Dickens has a long list of quite secondary books. So what can I say? I feel like I’m in good company in not having a classic every time.
Matthew Peterson:
Well, it seems like you’ve got your hand in a lot of things. You know, Ultimate Iron Man, graphic novels, screen plays, theater, even some Xbox games. You mentioned the online magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show. A lot of things that you’re busy with! Final question: What are you working on now?
Orson Scott Card:
What I’m working on now is a book that I’m turning in early in December. It’s my first intended to be YA fiction. You know, I told you Ender’s Game was for adults? Well, this book--Serpent World is the over all name, though Pathfinder is the name of the first book--is meant as an entry in the YA category. Again, that doesn’t mean--and I was quite clear to the editors about this--that doesn’t mean I’m going to be talking down. I hate kid’s books that treat kids as if they were somehow a stupider breed. Really all that you have to do with children’s books as far as I can see is you have to be more rigorous about making sure that you’re not wasting their time with fluff. ‘Cause they get impatient. They set the book aside. So, anyway, I’m working on that. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. But then I kind of had that hope of everything I’ve done.
Matthew Peterson:
Of every one.
Orson Scott Card:
And then immediately after that, I’ll be doing Mithermages, which is the book that I was supposed to have done before turning in Hidden Empire.
Matthew Peterson:
So Mithermages, what’s the name of that one?
Orson Scott Card:
I have one book called Stone Father that is from that series. And that’s really the best introduction to it that I can think of is Stone Father.
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