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

(Indeed, that may be the reason I have always been so skeptical of the whole contemporary critical scene, in which the text is regarded as some immutable miracle, to be worshipped or dissected as if it were the story itself. What anyone trained as an editor and rewriter knows is that the text is not the story—the text is merely one attempt to place the story inside the memory of the audience. The text can be replaced by an infinite number of other attempts. Some will be better than others, but no text will be “right” for all audiences, nor will any one text be “perfect.” The story exists only in the memory of the reader, as an altered version of the story intended (consciously or not) by the author. It is possible for the audience to create for themselves a better story than the author could ever have created in the text. Thus audiences have taken to their hearts miserably-written stories like Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, because what they received transcended the text; while any number of beautifully written texts have been swallowed up without a trace, because the text, however lovely, did a miserable job of kindling a living story within the readers’ memories.)

How other stories in this collection grew out of that friendship, those lunchtime meetings, will be recounted in their place. This story came rather late in that time. I had already left The Ensign magazine and was beginning my freelance career. I still had much contact with the Ensign staff because I was supposed to be finishing a project that I had not yet completed when I resigned my position as of 1 January 1978. In one conversation I had with Jay Parry, he mentioned a terrible dream he had had. “You can use it for a story if you want,” he said. “I think there’s a story in it, but it would be too terrible for me to write.”

Jay lacks my vicious streak, you see; or perhaps it’s just that he was already a father and I wasn’t. I’m not altogether sure I could write this story after Kristine and I started having kids. At the time, though, Jay’s nightmare image of a child with flipper arms drowning in a toilet seemed fascinating, even poignant.

I had recently read whatever story collection of Harlan Ellison’s was current at the time, and I had discerned a pattern in his toughest, meanest tales—a sin-and-punishment motif in which terrible things only seemed to happen to the most appropriate people. It seemed obvious to me that the way to develop this deformed baby into a story was to have it come into the life of someone who deserved to be confronted with a twisted child.

After my first draft, however, I submitted the story to Francois Camoin, by then my teacher in writing classes at the University of Utah. I had taken writing classes before, and except for occasional helpful comments had found that their primary value was that they provided me with deadlines so I had to produce stories. Francois was different—he actually understood, not only how to write, but also how to teach writing, a skill that is almost completely missing among teachers of creative writing in America today. He didn’t know everything—no one does—but compared to what I knew at the time he might as well have known everything! Even though I was selling my science fiction quite regularly, I still didn’t understand, except in the vaguest way, why some of my stories worked and others didn’t. Francois helped open up my own work to me, both its strengths and weaknesses.

As a playwright I had learned that I have a tendency to write in epigrams; as one critical friend put it, all my characters said words that were meant to be carved in stone over the entrance of a public building. That tendency toward clever didacticism was still showing up in my fiction (and probably still does). It was Francois who helped me understand that while the events of the story should be clear—what happened and why—the meaning of the story should be subtle, arcane; it should be left lying about for readers to discover, but never forced upon them. “This story is about guilt,” said Francois. “In fact, the child, the tiny Fury, is guilt. When you have a word embodied in a story, the word itself should never appear. So don’t ever say the word ‘guilt’ in this story.”

I knew at once that he was right. It wasn’t just a matter of removing the word, of course. It meant removing most sentences that had the word in it, and occasionally even whole paragraphs had to come out. It was a pleasurable process, though not without some pain—rather like peeling away dead skin after a bad sunburn. What was left was much stronger.

It appeared in a rather obscure place—Roy Torgeson’s Chrysalis anthology series from Zebra books. But Terry Carr picked it up for his best-of-the-year fantasy anthology, so it got a little better exposure. My name is on it, but much of this story is owed to others: Jay, for the seminal image; Harlan, for the basic structure; and Francois, for the things that aren’t in the text here printed.

Like “Eumenides,” this story began with someone else’s nightmare. My wife woke up one morning upset by a strange lingering dream. We lived at the time in a rented Victorian house on J Street in the Avenues district of Salt Lake City. We were only a bit more than a block from the Emigration Ward LDS meetinghouse, where we attended church. In Kristine’s dream, the bishop of our ward had called us up and told us that they were holding a funeral for a stranger the next day, but that tonight there was no place to keep the coffin. Would we be willing to let them bring it by and leave it in our living room until morning?

Kristine isn’t in the habit of saying no to requests for help, even in her dreams, and so she agreed. She woke up from her dream just as she was opening the coffin lid.

That was all—a stranger’s coffin in the living room. But I knew at once that there was a story in it, and what the story had to be. A coffin in your own living room can only have one body in it: your own. And so I sat down to write a story of a man who was haunting his own house without realizing it, until he finally opened the coffin and climbed in, accepting death.

What I didn’t know when I started writing was why he was left outside his coffin for a while, and why he then reconciled himself to death. So I started writing as much of the story as I knew, hoping something would come to me. I told of the moment of his death in his office, though he didn’t realize it was death; I wrote of his homecoming; but the ultimate meaning of the story came by accident. I can’t remember now what my mistake was in the first draft. Something like this: During the office scene I had written that he had no children, but by the time I wrote his homecoming, I had forgotten his childlessness and had him hear children’s voices or see their drawings on the refrigerator—or something to that effect. Only when I showed the first draft of the story’s opening to Kristine did we (probably she) notice the contradiction.

It was one of those silly dumb authorial lapses that every writer commits. My first thought was simply to change one or the other reference so they were reconciled.

However, as I sat there, preparing to revise, I had an intuition that my “mistake” was no mistake at all, but rather my unconscious answer to the fundamental question in the story: Why couldn’t he accept death at first? Instead of eliminating the contradiction, I enhanced it, switching back and forth. Now they have children, now they don’t. He could not accept death until their childlessness was replaced with children.

If you want to get psychological about it, Kristine was pregnant with our first child at the time. My “mistake” may have been a traditional freudian slip, revealing my ambivalence about entering onto the irrevocable step of having and raising children. What matters more, however, is not the personal source of the feeling, but what I learned about the process of writing: Trust your mistakes. Over and over again since then, I have found that when I do something “wrong” in an early draft of the story, I should not eliminate it immediately. I should instead explore it and see if there’s some way that the mistake can be justified, amplified, made part of the story. I have come to believe that a storyteller’s best work comes, not from his conscious plans, but from his impulses and errors. That is where his unconscious mind wells up to the surface. That is how stories become filled, not with what the writer believes that he believes, or thinks he ought to care about, but rather with what he believes without question and cares about most deeply. That is how a story acquires its truth.