Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

Barbara Bova had just become my agent, and I hadn’t sent her anything of novel length to sell. She was not deterred—I got a phone call from her saying that she had just received a decent offer from a publisher for the novel version of my novelette “Mikal’s Songbird,” which was at the time nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards.

“What novel version?” I said.

“Well, that’s the problem,” said she. “I need a few paragraphs from you telling how you’ll change it to make it a novel.”

“But it’s a novelette. It’s finished.”

“Think about it for a while, dear. Maybe you’ll find a novel in there somewhere. If you don’t, I’ll just turn down this very nice offer.”

Now, you must understand—I don’t automatically say yes just because I’m offered money. I had already turned down a request for a sequel to A Planet Called Treason because I couldn’t think of an adequate storyline, and I fully expected to do the same with this proposal.

I thought back over what happened in “Mikal’s Songbird” and tried to find a hook where I could hang new story elements. I rejected at once the idea of using the same plot and simply taking more words to tell it—I loathe excess description and empty writing. Besides, the world of “Mikal’s Songbird” was very sketchy and not terribly interesting. Nor could I think of a subplot that would add meaningful pages.

Then I realized that there might be something worth exploring in how Ansset became a Songbird. The Songhouse might be developed into a strange and fascinating milieu. I knew at once that it should be a sort of medieval monastery, a retreat and a school, a place where souls are saved—and, in the struggle, hurt.

Looking back, I can see now that part of my fascination with the Songhouse was a desire to explore the relationship between the individual and a highly demanding and rewarding community, which in my case meant the Mormon Church. While Mormonism has no monastic tradition, a good case could be made for the idea that the whole church is a kind of monastery, insulating its members from the world behind walls, not of stone, but of culture.

At the time, however, it just seemed like a pretty good science fiction idea—one that I could hang a novel on. At the same time, it involved a structural insight that I have used to good effect many times since: When expanding a short work into a long one, the place to go for a new material isn’t after the initial short story, but before it. By starting much earlier, and explaining how the characters got to where they are at the beginning of the short story, the milieu is much richer, the cast of characters much fuller, the characterization much deeper than it was in the original story.

Much outlining and map-drawing later, I sat down and began writing. The first section, in the Songhouse, grew to be much longer than I had expected. When it was done, I realized that it could stand alone quite nicely, so I sent it to Barbara, who sold it as a separate novella to Stan Schmidt, then quite new as editor of Analog. Word for word, it was identical with the opening chapters of Songmaster; as with the recent publication of sections of the Tales of Alvin Maker as separate stories, the novella “Songhouse” was a case of excerpting from a novel, not expanding a short work after the fact.

By the time I got to the events of the original novelette the milieu and characters had grown and changed so much that hardly a word of “Mikal’s Songbird” was usable. Events had new meanings; characters had different things to think and say. This first time, it was quite wrenching for me to throw out the entire text of a story that had been, after all, quite successful. But it had to be done if the novel was to have any integrity.

Songmaster ended up with some serious structural flaws—for instance, the “Kyaren” section lags quite badly and the novel seems to end when Ansset becomes emperor, so that readers often find it hard to figure out why there are still so many pages left. But these are the product of my unfamiliarity with the novel form, not the fact that Songmaster was an expansion. Despite its flaws, in fact, Songmaster is my earliest novel that I am willing to stand by in its original form, so that the editing I did in preparation for Tor’s recent reprint was on the level of tinkering with style. The structure has problems, but I’m willing to live with them, because the story still feels true to me as it stands, even if it isn’t as artful as I’d like.

In a way, “Mikal’s Songbird” was an adaptation right from the start. The novelette was only my fourth science fiction sale. “Ender’s Game” had been the first, a story that was quite easy to write. My next story died instantly; my third and fourth, “Follower” and “Malpractice,” sold—but only with strong editorial suggestions from Ben Bova at Analog. The next few stories I wrote, however, went nowhere—they were so bad that not only did no one buy them, but also one editor sent me an incredible two-page letter that can only be classed as hate-mail, and followed up by reviewing one of those unpublishable stories in a fanzine! These stories were so bad that someone had to drive a stake through their hearts, just to make sure they didn’t rise again.

And I was afraid. Though I had done quite well as a playwright in the Mormon theatre scene in Utah, I had no guarantee that I’d have a career in a genre that actually paid writers enough to live on. To me, at that bleak moment, it looked as though “Ender’s Game” might be the only successful story I’d ever write.

But I was determined to try again. This time, though, I went back to “Ender’s Game” and tried to determine what it was about that story that worked. In my ignorance, I saw only the most superficial strengths of the story: The hero was a child with extraordinary ability, who goes through a great deal of personal pain inflicted by adults who are trying to exploit him. Maybe this was a pattern I could use again, thought I.

There were other patterns, of course, that I might have followed: The success of “Ender’s Game” might have led me to write more military-training stories, for instance, or I might even have attempted a sequel at that time. Instead, true to a view of storytelling that I did not become conscious of until long after, I looked to the character’s role in his community in order to find the essence of the tale.

I should point out, too, that I thought of “Ender’s Game” as a successful story only in an artistic sense—I knew it worked, but because it had not yet been published, I had no idea whether it would be popular.

When I set out to follow that same pattern, I knew I had to come up with another way for my new child-hero to be exceptional. I’d used military talent with Ender; why not musical ability for my new hero? From there it was a fairly simple matter to come up with Ansset, Mikal’s Songbird; though the plot doesn’t follow “Ender’s Game,” the lifeline of the character certainly does.

I wrote “Mikal’s Songbird” quickly, and knew all through it that this story was alive the way “Ender’s Game” had been alive. It was still hot from xeroxing when I stuffed it into an envelope and mailed it to Ben Bova.

A couple of days later, though, in rereading the story, I knew that there were serious problems. This didn’t bother me—I was excited about the fact that for the first time I actually understood narrative well enough to see the flaws. So I did a substantial revision of the story, and then sent the new version to Ben, with a letter asking him to toss the first version and look only at this one.