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

In a way, this was analogous to starting Songmaster when Ansset was in the Songhouse; but it was also a radical departure, because instead of having a protagonist who was completely cut off from his family—the standard adolescent hero of most Romance—I was now committed to creating a hero whose connections to his family were still very much alive. I hardly knew how to begin; and so I mined my own life, looking back at my relationship with my older brother and sister as I had thought it was when I was about ten years old, then exaggerating it extravagantly in order to make it a justification for much of Ender’s behaviour later on. (I couldn’t very well use my childhood as it actually was, since my actual childhood produced, not a twisted military genius, but rather a bookish homebody.)

As with Songmaster, by the time I got back to the point where the novelette should have been inserted into the novel, the character and milieu had changed so much that only the first sentence of the novelette was usable: “Remember, the enemy’s gate is down.” However, I felt not a qualm about losing the novelette itself—I had known all along that it would be unusable because of my experience with Songmaster. In fact, I was delighted, because this proved that there was far more going on in the novel than I had ever conceived of when writing the novelette. And when I got to the payoff scene, where Ender discovers that he has been fighting the real war, not a simulation, I knew that there was still one more payoff to go—the final chapter, entitled “Speaker for the Dead.”

Ironically, though, this duplicated one of the structural flaws in Songmaster—once again, few readers could understand why there were still so many pages left when the story was clearly over. Even this flaw didn’t bother me. I had a master’s degree in English by now, so I knew how to excuse it in literary terms: I was making the reader go through the same kind of revision of the meaning of the story’s past that Ender went through. Ah, how the tools of criticism allow us to justify the lapses of our art!

Besides expansions of short works to make novels, I have also revised my first two novels. Part of my motive was simple literary self-defense—by revising them, I disarm critics who are apt to scorn them, because I in effect am saying, “I know they weren’t all that good.” But much more important to me was the fact that I still cared about the stories. Jason Worthing and Abner Doon of the Worthing stories and Lanik Mueller of A Planet Called Treason were once important enough to me that I wrote books about them; just because I now knew more about writing books didn’t mean that I should care less about the stories I had told back when I was a novice.

Hot Sleep and Capitol, I felt, were bad enough that the need to fix them was almost an emergency. Even though they were still in print and still selling rather well, I was able to persuade Susan Allison to withdraw both books and allow me to replace them with a single work to be called The Worthing Chronicle. Little did either of us know how hopelessly uncommercial the result would be—but I still regard it as one of my best works, and I’m grateful to her for allowing me to publish it.

The flaws in Hot Sleep had arisen from my feeble attempts to control the vast sweep of time involved in the story. With The Worthing Chronicle, I unified the story by containing it within a frame, the story of a village whose life had been deeply affected by the outcome of the whole Worthing story. In effect, the new novel was the story of how people are transformed by stories—a circularity that still delights me. It’s a series of fictions and dreams and memories all bound up so closely together that it’s impossible even within the story to say what is real and what is now. The process of adaptation was exhilarating—but, as with Songmaster and as would later be true with Ender’s Game, hardly a sentence from the original books remained in the new version.

Indeed, if there is anything that I think is the key to successfully transforming one version of a story into another, it is to completely discard the first text and develop a new text that contains the same story—the same causally related events—but enriches them with new characters and relationships, new and richer milieux, and many more ideas than the original version contained.

That’s why I was so frustrated by the fact that St. Martin’s Press, in its eagerness to capitalize on the commercial success of Ender’s Game, insisted on going back to press with a new printing of A Planet Called Treason before I had time to write a completely new version. I had long harboured an ambition to return to the tale of Lanik Mueller, but this time tell it in third person, with many more characters and subplots that would make it one of my deepest novels instead of the shallowest. To my outrage at the time, Thomas Dunne would not relent and allow me to do the ideal version of the book. Instead, all I had time to do was revise the opening and edit heavily throughout the book. The result was a novel that, while no longer embarrassing, was far short of the ideal that I had harboured in my imagination. The book remained in first person and continued to follow the same narrative line, with no new characters or events. It was and remains quite frustrating, but at present I have no plans to go back and revise it ever again—if for no other reason than because there is no reversion clause in my contract with St. Martin’s (the result of signing a contract as a naive youth without an agent), so that the same publisher would own any revision of the book. Besides, a third version of the same book is certainly too absurd to contemplate.

My most recent venture into expanding a shorter work was my novelization of James Cameron’s film The Abyss. The problems of novelizing a screenplay are enormous—they are made virtually hopeless in most cases by the fact that the novelizer is forced to work from the screenplay alone, and the screenplay is not a viable story. A screenplay is only a plan for a work of art, like a fresco painter’s cartoon; it is not until director and actors interpret the script that it becomes a finished story.

The only reason I agreed to do the novelization was because Jim Cameron was as determined as I was to make the novel a viable work of art in its own right. Unlike most novelizers, I had complete access to the film itself, and to all of the screenwriter’s research material. Even more important, however, was the fact that Cameron allowed me to do to his screenplay what I had done to “Ender’s Game” and “Mikal’s Songbird” in order to expand them—I went back before the beginning of the original story and developed the earlier lives of the characters.

This time, however, I could not go as far as I had with my own work, if only because when I got to the point where the film began, the words and events of the film had to be used exactly as they stood. (We take pride in the fact that this novelization contains every word of significant action and dialogue that actually made it into the film, besides occasional extra scenes that I wrote.) Nevertheless, my preliminary chapters, including a chapter about the early life of a non-human character that quite properly did not end up in the final book, became the root of the novel.

When I gave the early chapters to Cameron, he immediately called them “backstory,” the information about characters that never shows up in a film. I was content to have him regard those chapters that way. After all, he liked them well enough that he showed them to the actors, allowing them to help shape their thinking about their roles. But to me, they were not “backstory,” not background at all. Instead, they set up fundamental questions in the readers’ minds, questions that are not resolved until the end of the book. The film is structured as an adventure story that is taken over by the strong relationship story contained within it. My novel, however, is structured as a character story from the beginning, so that to me, at least, the novel is truer to the tale both Cameron and I wanted to tell than the film is.