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

Within a few days I got a cheque. Ben had bought the first version, flaws and all. At that moment I knew I had a career—not because I had found a repeatable formula, for in fact I had not, but rather because I had found a road into that place inside myself from which true stories arise. For a long time my stories have grown out of childhood and adolescence, probably because that was the role in life that I best understood—it was not until Speaker for the Dead that I was able to work with truly adult characters, and even then the story was heavily populated with unusual children.

What Ben ended up publishing was, of course, the revised version of the story—he had simply bought the first version before the second one arrived. From the start, however, and at every step thereafter, the story of Ansset was continuously derived from previous versions, expanding and growing every time I went back to it. Every version represents another stage in my self-schooling as a writer of narrative.

Even in the writing of the novel Songmaster, I was consciously “at school.” I knew that Hot Sleep was a failure as a novel (though, ironically, it remained my best-selling book until the publication of the novel Ender’s Game); in order to overcome my dread of a novel’s sheer length, I had conceived Hot Sleep as a series of novelettes, not a true novel. I was also beginning to realize that A Planet Called Treason was rushed, sketchy, abrupt, not a smoothly flowing work. In other words, I still didn’t know how to write a novel.

In order to try to understand how a novel worked, I carefully examined Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. I ended up, alas, with little intellectual understanding of the novel form, but the sheer reading of the book gave me a feel for a novel’s pace. It was as if reading Humboldt’s Gift set my metabolic rate; then, when I sat down to work on Songmaster, I was able to keep up that same rhythm of event, language, and scene. No one reading my work will ever accuse me of being Bellowesque; nevertheless, his novel was my touchstone in discovering how to write a true novel.

As a result, Songmaster was my one story with explicit connections with other works, a clear pattern of growth and change that paralleled my own. Expanding it to a novel may have come from a commercially-minded editor’s suggestion to my agent, and my own source for the story’s idea may have been a deliberate mining of my own previous work, but it ended up as a story I believed in passionately—and the process of writing it was a kind of training ground for my career as a writer, just as my characters Ender and Ansset had to go through training to become a person capable of surviving.

The next “short” work I adapted into a novel followed quite a different pattern. Roy Torgeson had asked me for a fantasy story for his Chrysalis anthology series, and I began developing Hart’s Hope from a map I had doodled and an idea about somebody whose magical power was the negation of magic. The story grew in the back of my mind while I worked on finishing the first draft of my novel Saints and a production revision of my historical Mormon play Father, Mother, Mother, and Mom; when Saints and FMM&M were finished, I turned with relief to a fantasy tale as an antidote to the rigours of historical writing. However, having just finished a sprawling novel of a thousand pages, it’s hardly a surprise that Hart’s Hope began growing out of control. Before I had finished the novella, I knew exactly how to turn it into a novel; I sent a copy to Barbara at the same time as my submission to Roy, and she soon sold it as a prospectus for a novel. While the novel version went through a couple of major rewrites over a period of years before it finally was published in 1983, it remained substantially the same story as the novella—the novel was not so much an expansion of the novella as the novella was a compression of the novel.

The same is true of the novel Wyrms and the novella “Unwyrm.” I was writing “Unwyrm” for George R.R. Martin’s Campbell-nominate anthology series, and as I wrote it I discovered that it simply would not stay under 40,000 words. The novella that George ended up buying was a cut-down version that removed several important plotlines; I finished the novel version only a few weeks after the novella.

(The collapse of Blue Jay Books killed the anthology, so that “Unwyrm” never appeared in print.)

So neither Hart’s Hope nor Wyrms represents an expansion on the order of Songmaster. The “short” version in both cases was very long, and in both cases I knew it would be a novel before the novella was completed.

The novel Ender’s Game is the only work of mine, besides Songmaster, that was truly expanded from a short work that I had not intended to expand. Indeed, I had never expected to do anything with Ender Wiggin again. A friend had once urged me to write a sequel to “Ender’s Game,” but when he suggested possible storylines, they were lame enough to convince me that a sequel was impossible.

In 1980, though, I was beginning to work with a novel idea with the working title Speaker of Death, a sketchy idea about an alien people who periodically mauled each other in devastating wars that were, without their realizing it, their means of reproduction. The truth would be discovered by a human character whose job was speaking the truth about people at funerals. I couldn’t make the idea work, however, until suddenly it dawned on me that the Speaker should be Ender Wiggins as an adult. Who better to understand the impulse that made a species nearly destroy itself than a man who had once inadvertently destroyed another people?

At once the work began to come to life. In 1982 an outline was ready to offer to a publisher. It was explicitly a sequel to “Ender’s Game”, which remained my most popular—and most anthologized—story. Barbara offered it to Tom Doherty, the former publisher at Ace who was starting his own company. For financing reasons I got a request to hurry and write a draft of the book before the end of 1982; I complied, but in the process learned that this was going to be harder to write than I supposed. There was more to my story than one human and a bunch of aliens. I was getting involved in creating a human family in whose lives Ender was deeply involved. And the story simply wasn’t working. I didn’t know how to write it.

A few months later, I realized why. In order to make Ender viable as a character in Speaker of Death, I had to expand on the meaning of the events in “Ender’s Game.” I had to deal with the transformation of Ender Wiggin in the aftermath of his xenocide. And to do that in Speaker of Death meant picking up the story right at the end of “Ender’s Game,” showing Ender’s self-discovery and his transformation into a Speaker. Then I’d have to skip three thousand years and begin an entirely new storyline. It was impossible!

So when I happened to run into Tom Doherty at the ABA in Dallas in the spring of 1983, on impulse I proposed to him that instead of the horribly deformed Speaker that was emerging, all the problems would be solved if I went back and rewrote “Ender’s Game” as a novel, incorporating into it all the changes that were needed to properly set up Speaker. Tom promptly agreed, and on a handshake I was committed to my second expansion of a novelette into a novel.

Just as I had studied “Ender’s Game” in order to write “Mikal’s Songbird,” now I recalled my experience with Songmaster in order to figure out how to write Ender’s Game. I decided at once to begin Ender’s Game much earlier than the novelette—to start when Ender was still with his family.