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

The result is one of the strangest stories I’ve ever written. But I like it. I enjoyed using this epistolary form to tell the tale of a hideously malformed relationship between a couple who had lived together far longer than they had any reason to.

This story came with its own afterword. Let me only add that since its publication, it has been criticized somewhat for its supposed cheating—I promise at the beginning to tell the truth, and then I lie. I can only say that it is a long tradition in ghost stories to pretend to be telling the truth; part of the pleasure in the tale is to keep the reader wondering whether this time the story might not be real. The ghost stories I’ve enjoyed most and remember the best have been the ones told as if they were true and had really happened to the teller. I tip my hat to Jack McLaughlin, a wonderful grad student in the theatre department at BYU, who spooked a whole bunch of us undergrad acting students with a really hair-raising poltergeist story that Actually Happened To Him.

I also enjoy the fact that criticisms of my story for violating expectations have all come from the more literary, “experimental” wing of the science fiction community. It seems that they love experimentation and literary flamboyance—but only if it follows the correct line. If somebody dares to do something that is surprisingly shocking instead of predictably shocking, well, fie on them. Thus do the radicals reveal their orthodoxy.

The fact remains that Lost Boys is the most autobiographical, personal, and painful story I’ve ever written. I wrote it in the absolutely only way I could have written it. So even if the manner of its writing is a literary crime, as these critics say, I can only answer, “So shoot me.” I’m in the business of telling true stories as well as I possibly can. I’ve never yet found any of their rules that helped me tell a story better; and if I had followed their rules on this story, I never could have told it at all.

Never mind the question of why anybody would ever become a writer at all. The sheer arrogance of thinking that other people ought to pay to read my words should be enough to mark all us writers as unfit for decent society. But then, few indeed are the communities that reward proper modesty and disdain those who thrust themselves into the limelight. All human societies hunger for storytellers, and those whose tales we like, we reward well. In the meantime, the storytellers are constantly reinventing and redefining their society. We are paid to bite the hand that feeds us. We are birds that keep tearing down and rebuilding every nest in the tree.

So never mind the question of why I became a writer. Instead let’s ask an easy one. Why did I choose to write science fiction?

The glib answer is to say that I didn’t. Some are born to science fiction, some choose science fiction, and some have science fiction thrust upon them. Surely I belong to the last category. I was a playwright by choice. Oh, I entered college as an archaeology major, but I soon discovered that being an archaeologist didn’t mean being Thor Heyerdahl or Yigael Yadin. It meant sorting through eight billion potsherds. It meant moving a mountain with a teaspoon. In short, it meant work. Therefore it was not for me.

During the two semesters it took for me to make this personal discovery, I had already taken four theatre classes for every archaeology class I signed up for, and it was in theatre that I spent all my time. Because I attended Brigham Young High School, I was already involved with the BYU theatre program before I officially started college. In fact, I had already been in a student production, and continued acting almost continuously through all my years at the university. I was no great shakes as an actor—too cerebral, not able to use my body well enough to look comfortable or right on stage. But I gave great cold readings at auditions, so I kept getting cast. And when I gave up on archaeology, it was theatre that was there waiting for me. It was the first time I consciously made a decision based on autobiography. Instead of examining my feelings (which change hourly anyway) or making those ridiculous pro-and-con lists that always look so rational, I simply looked back at the last few years of my life and saw that the only thing I did that I really followed through on, the only thing I did over and over again regardless of whether it profited me in any way, was theatre. So I changed majors, thereby determining much of my future.

One obvious result was that I lost my scholarship. I was at BYU on a full-ride presidential scholarship—tuition, books, housing. But I had to maintain a high grade point average, and while that was easy enough in academic subjects, it was devilishly hard in the subjective world of the arts. The matter hadn’t come up before—presidential scholars hadn’t ever gone into the arts before me. So there was no mechanism for dealing with the subjective grades that came out of theatre. If I worked my tail off in an academic subject, I got an A. Period. No question. But I could work myself half to death on a play, do my very best, and still get a C because the teacher didn’t agree with my interpretation or didn’t like my blocking or just plain didn’t like me, and who could argue? There was nothing quantifiable. So choosing the arts cost me money. It also taught me that you can never please a critic determined to detest your work. I had to choose my professors carefully, or reconcile myself to low grades. I did both.

But if I wasn’t working for grades and I wasn’t trying to change myself to fit professors’ preconceived notions of what my work ought to be, what was I working for? The answer came to me gradually, but once I understood it I never wavered. I rejected the notion, put forth by one English professor, that one should write for oneself. Indeed, his own life was a clear refutation of his lofty sentiment that “I write for myself and God.” In fact he spent half his life pressing his writings on anyone who would hold still long enough to read or listen. He showed me what I was already becoming aware of: Art is a dialogue with the audience. There is no reason to create art except to present it to other people; and you present it to other people in order to change them. The world must be changed by what I create, I decided, or it isn’t worth doing.

Within a year of becoming a theatre major, I was writing plays. I didn’t plan it. Writing wasn’t something I thought of as a career. In my family, writing was simply something that you did. My dad often bought Writer’s Digest; I entered their contest a couple of times in my teens. But mostly I thought of writing as coming up with skits or assemblies at school or roadshows at church (Mormons have a longstanding commitment to theatre); it also meant that I could usually ace an essay exam if I knew even a little bit about the subject. It wasn’t a career.

But as a fledgling director, I had run into the frustration of directing inadequate scripts. When I was assistant director of a college production of Flowers for Algernon, I finally got a professor—the director—to agree with me. The second act was terrible. I had read and loved the story, and so I was particularly frustrated by some bad choices made by the adapter. With the director’s permission, I went home and rewrote the second act. We used my script.

About the same time (I think), I was taking a course in advanced interpretation, which included reader’s theatre. I loved the whole concept of stripping the stage and letting the actors, in plain clothes, with no sets and minimal movements, act out the story for the audience. As part of the course, I wrote an adaptation of Marjorie Kellogg’s Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. I had loved the book, and my adaptation was (and still is) one of my best works, because it preserved both the story and the madcap flavor of the writing. I asked for permission to direct it. I was told that advanced interp wasn’t a course for which students were allowed to direct. There was only one course undergraduates could take that allowed them to direct a play, and I had taken it and received a C, and that was that.