31 May 2006

Photo courtesy Bob Henderson, Henderson Photography, Inc.

"Uncle Orson's Writing Class," a two day writing course taught by Card, starts Monday, June 12 at Southern Virginia University. Admission is $175. Students must bring their own computer to complete assignments. For more information call 336-282-9848 or http://www.hatrack.com/bootcamp.shtml

Best-selling science fiction novelist Orson Scott Card, 54, lives in Greensboro, N.C., with his wife Kathleen and youngest daughter Zina Margaret.

HIS BOOKS INCLUDE

Science fiction:

Ender's Game

Speaker for the Dead

Ender's Shadow

Fantasy:

Seventh Son

Red Prophet

Religious:

Sarah

Rebekah

Rachel and Lea

Graphic Novels:

The Ultimate Iron Man

Wyrms

What made you decide to join the faculty at Southern Virginia University?

I have always intended teaching to be my main career; it was quite an accident that my writing paid well enough to provide me with a living. So for many years I have taught a course here and a course there — many at Appalachian State in Boone, NC, but also a novel-writing course at Pepperdine and workshops at UNC-Greensboro and Utah Valley State College in Orem. Because I never quite got that Ph.D. at Notre Dame, however, a fulltime faculty position seemed out of the question — especially since I think the whole “Critical Theory” movement from Deconstruction through Multiculturalism has led to such an amazing misunderstanding of what literature is, how it works, and what it’s for, not to mention the dominance of a single slightly insane political doctrine to which I don’t subscribe, that I could find few English faculties that would have been comfortable with what I would teach.

Southern Virginia University is a place where my approach to teaching literature and writing fits comfortably, and where the students who are drawn there share my values. Since my method of teaching writing actually leads to improvement in the students’ skills as fiction writers (a rare thing in creative writing programs), I had long been uncomfortably aware that I was helping students with radically different values from mine become better at propounding those values through fiction. At SVU, I’m far more comfortable with the values that my students bring to their storytelling.

How did you get started as a writer? How did you make your way from writing plays to writing science fiction and fantasy novels? What first made you become interested in science fiction? Do you find you have different mindsets for writing fantasy as opposed to science fiction?

Since a halfway decent answer to this question would be my autobiography, I’m sure you wish only a small and highly quotable subset of the answer <grin>.

I began as a poet — that was my constant occupation my first few years in college, and the reason I carried a notebook with me everywhere. But as I got involved in theatre, I also began writing scenes, doctoring other people’s scripts, writing readers theatre adaptations of fiction, and finally writing full-length plays of my own.

Yet right along with this interest, I had become intrigued with science fiction through my on-again, off-again reading in the genre. So I came up with story ideas and created moody milieux where I began writing tales that were really little more than dialogue and stage directions in disguise. When my theatre company folded, I needed to earn extra money to pay off the debts. So I turned my hand to science fiction because it had a short story market that was constantly hungry for new writers. It was a good fit; I sold almost everything I wrote.

Fantasy and science fiction don’t require different mindsets, but contemporary settings vs. historical or alien or fantasy settings do require quite a different approach. With a contemporary novel, I can rely on the audience to recognize cues to the time and place; with a novel set in another time and place, I have to create the world along with the characters, relationships, and connected events. It radically changes the expository flow, which writers all know is the single most difficult balancing act in fiction.

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, does your faith come into play in your fiction, and if so, how? C.S. Lewis used science fiction and fantasy to present his religious beliefs. Do you consider yourself to have followed his example in any way?

Because my plays were mostly tied to scripture or Church history, when I turned to writing fiction I was keenly aware that I must not use my fiction to expound on religious themes. In fact, though, what I find is that without ever meaning to, I can’t help but include my core beliefs in everything I write — not beliefs about particular doctrines, but beliefs about how the world works, what causes things to happen, why people do the things they do, and which actions are noble, which evil or despicable, etc. Since many of these beliefs derive from Mormon teachings and my experiences as a Latter-day Saint, then in that sense, without any effort on my part, some aspects of my faith are going to show up in my fiction. But I think fiction is a lousy place to try to proselytize — after all, we agree going into a novel that it’s a pack of lies (that’s what “fiction” means!) — and my conscious religious beliefs are too sacred for me to insert them into what is, after all, entertainment. If somebody wants to know about the Mormon religion from me, I’ll be happy to tell them — but not in my fiction.

Like C.S. Lewis, I have written essays that serve to “defend the faith,” and I aspire to do so as effectively as he did. But those were essays. I rather dislike his overly Christian science fiction, and I find that the Narnia stories are weakest where he bends the story to fit his theology.

Rather I follow Tolkien’s example. When you read Lord of the Rings, you are barely aware of any religion at all; but when you analyze the moral universe of the novel, you soon realize that it could only have been written by a Christian — and a Catholic in particular. Yet no one emerges from LOTR converted to Catholicism. Rather they are converted to the values of heroic struggle, sacrifice, enduring hope, decency, camaraderie, etc.

I have written biblical fiction (Stone Tables, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel & Leah) — but even that fiction never requires the reader to believe that Moses or Abraham were really prophets. You could be an atheist and read those books with emotional involvement, because they are about characters who believe, and it is the characters, not the beliefs, that drive the story. Yet at the same time, I have been very careful to be absolutely respectful of the original source material — I never turn good guys to bad or vice versa; I never “explain away” miracles. I never forget that these books are holy writ to most of the readers, and I have a responsibility to be true to the values of the original. As a result, these books have been well-reviewed by Christians and Jews and atheists alike.

I do sometimes put little winks and nods into my fiction — in-jokes that only Mormons are likely to get. But I also put in winks and nods to sci-fi and fantasy fans, too, like the time when Alvin (in my Tales of Alvin Maker series) dreams the entire plot of Lord of the Rings. I have a character named Molly Bloom in Hart’s Hope and fiddle with enough literary tropes to prove that I went to grad school. These have nothing to do with teaching religion and everything to do with teasing subgroups within the audience.

Do you consider yourself to be politically conservative? What sort of feedback do you generally receive from your fans about your columns in The Ornery American? How do you respond to fans who may disagree with your viewpoints (for example, gay marriage or the conflict in Iraq)?

I am actually a Moynihan Democrat — what would have been called a liberal back in 1975. It’s not my fault that there is no political party that reflects my views. Take “gay marriage” — fifteen years ago everybody openly said that of course the idea of gay marriage was absurd and that legalizing homosexuality would never lead to something so ridiculous. Between then and now nothing has been discovered by science and no consensus has been developed politically for any change in that policy — we simply have a group within America that has decided that anyone who disagrees with them is evil. I’m still waiting for the intelligent civilized political discussion about the costs to our society of eliminating any preferential treatment for heterosexual, two-parent families. It hasn’t happened — the name-calling started before discussion could even begin. Does that make me conservative? I thought it made me thoughtful.

There’s nothing inherently conservative, either, about supporting a war against a vile dictatorship (Saddam) and against radical terrorist Islamists. In fact, it strikes me as a regrettable necessity forced on us precisely because our previous police-action approach had made us look weak. The results of this highly successful war (despite the absurd propaganda that considers anything less than perfection to be dreadful) have been remarkable as most of the safe havens for terrorists have changed their tune. But let’s keep in mind that during the cold war, liberals and conservatives opposed expansionist Communism, doing their best to contain that poison within its boundaries. It’s again absurd that we have turned this into a partisan issue, solely because one side has such nostalgia for the anti-war movement of the 60s and such irrational hatred for this president — hatred always based on what it was believed that he might do, and almost never on what he has actually done.

In short, I am baffled that our society has polarized to the extent that it has. Believe me, I can infuriate a room full of Republicans and seize every opportunity to do so, since I have little patience with their worship for the free market or their opposition to civilized control of weaponry. I am disgusted by the short-sightedness of leaders of both parties. But the fact that I find George W. Bush to be the most moderate, thoughtful, rational, and responsible president since Dwight D. Eisenhower makes me look conservative to those who think “conservative” is a dirty word and George W. Bush is the devil.

Real conservatives know that Bush isn’t a conservative at all. Only when you stand on the leftmost edge of American politics does he seem that way. When you stand in the middle, you find Bush standing right there with you.

My fans can take my political views as they wish. They won’t find them in my fiction, except insofar as my fiction reflects the underlying principles I use to make sense of the real world, too. My characters have political opinions, but they are rarely my political views. I follow the Polonius rule in my fiction — if I ever find myself tempted to come up with clever, truthful sayings, I put them in the mouth of a character who comes off as an idiot. If I ever let my fiction be propaganda, then my career as a fiction writer is over.

So when some fans, finding out how evil I am because I don’t follow the party line they learned from extremist professors in college, vow never to read my fiction again, all I can do is shrug. Whatever they once valued in my fiction is still there; what surprises me is that they don’t have wit enough to realize that maybe the guy who wrote those stories might have gone through serious study before reaching his conclusions on political and moral matters, and maybe they ought to consider that it’s a good thing to study the writings of people you disagree with. That sometimes they actually know something you didn’t know.

I used to think that’s what a university education taught you to do. But now I see that universities exist to train students to shout down and silence anyone who doesn’t agree with their own sad little uninformed views, so they can protect their ignorance from anything threatening — like facts.

That’s what my Ornery.org website is all about: Providing a place for people to discuss ideas intelligently. Naturally, we find that people with rigid, doctrinaire views try to take over, and we constantly have to nudge them to accept the idea that other people will disagree with them and it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re fools or devils. We try to keep a place for civil discussion between people who disagree.

But remember this: Whenever people believe that all decent, intelligent people must agree with them and everyone else should be silenced, what you have is fanaticism. America’s Left has for some decades now behaved with the kind of irrational zealotry that has led to persecution and tyranny in decades and centuries past. When they maneuver to eliminate from university faculties anyone who does not adhere to the Leftmost views in American life, what you have is oppression, not liberalism — and the resulting institution is a sectarian seminary, not a university. I don’t advocate firing people who disagree with me — I’d just like them to stop firing or refusing to hire anybody who disagrees with them. Maybe then we could have university students graduate with an understanding that many different people with different ideas can coexist and work out compromises that create a peaceful, tolerant society instead of the intolerant one that the Left has created on our campuses, in most newspapers, and in most films and television — in other words, throughout our public intellectual life.

You have put a lot of energy into encouraging new writers, including teaching workshops and writing about book about how to break into science fiction and fantasy writing. What drives you to do this? Are there any “success stories” about your students that you’d like to share?

Since I’ve gone to the trouble of figuring out how to do this craft of writing, it only makes sense to write down what I’ve learned and pass it along to those who care. I’ve never written a book about how to “break into” sf and fantasy writing, however. What I wrote was a book on how to create, structure, and write sf and fantasy stories. My goal isn’t to help people sell, it’s to help them do the craft as well as they can so that readers (if any) will enjoy their work.

I teach my students what I teach; they learn what they learn. The most I can give them is a better understanding of the toolset that storytellers work with. Whether they then have the ambition to push past obstacles and get the writing done, and then get somebody to publish their work — that’s entirely up to them. As is the actual content of their stories. If the things they care about enough to write about them simply don’t interest large numbers of people, then no matter how well they may have written, there won’t be a large audience for their work. That’s not their fault — or mine. So I have dozens of success stories, but only some of them involve selling their work. And to retell the success story, I’d have to show you the mistakes that writer was making before, and then show you how those mistakes went away when the writer understood certain key techniques. However, to do so would break the confidentiality that is tacitly a part of the teacher-student relationship. They are the authors of their stories. Whatever I taught them, they would undoubtedly have learned anyway, so it would be presumptuous of me to claim credit for it, and downright vile of me to show the flaws in their student work. Therefore I never tell such success stories. My writing students are responsible for their own success — if my class helps them, then it just shows they were smart enough to take my class and learn what I put on offer there.

You’ve recently branched into comic books and computer games. What interests you about these media? What are you working on now, writing-wise?

I was never a reader of comics, but several publishers approached me about different projects and I’ve enjoyed trying to learn a powerful and very different storytelling medium. My Ultimate Iron Man books have been wonderful fun to write, and have been brilliantly drawn; I’m glad they’ve been received well. And the adaptations of some of my novels into comic (Red Prophet; Wyrms) have been very good — I’m proud of them.

I’ve been working with computer games for decades now. I reviewed them back in the early 80s, when there were few reviewers, and when they were still fitting games into the 48K of available RAM in an Atari 800 or a Commodore 64. I’ve consulted with game companies from time to time along the way, and have loved every moment of my involvement with games. But it takes far longer and is far more soul-consuming to create a game than to write a novel. Plus, games always have the same protagonist: the player. I prefer to write about a more varied selection of human beings in my fiction.

It’s film where I’m hoping to make real progress personally. I just finished a new draft of the Ender’s Game screenplay for Warner Brothers, and my little film company, Taleswapper LLC, is working hard to get several other film projects before the cameras.

What can you tell me about the film adaptation of Ender’s Game?

When the Warner Brothers option was about to expire in December, Warner Brothers put a new executive on the project, Lynn Harris, who absolutely has the vision of what the film needs to be. Though several other writers had tried to come up with scripts, none really did the job as it needs to be done. So part of renewing the option was for me to write another draft. I’m just about to submit it to the studio; if that one still doesn’t work for them (it works for me!), then ... well, it’s their money! They’ll hire another writer, and we’ll go through another round and see what happens.

Ender’s Game looks, at first glance, like an obvious movie to make. Lots of cool visuals, lots of action, and a very emotional story. What’s often overlooked is taht everything depends on experience everything through Ender’s point of view, knowing what he’s thinking and feeling all the time. That’s a place where film simply cannot go. So the adaptation has to not only compress the story (a film of the novel, scene for scene, would be five or six hours long, and not fun to watch) but also find ways to bring to the filmable surface aspects of motivation that in the novel come directly from inside the characters’ heads.

One key decision — it was Ann LaGravanes’s idea — was to combine Ender’s Game and its more-recent parallel novel, Ender’s Shadow, into one film. The result has been breath-taking: By giving Ender a foil, the character Bean from Shadow, we are able to learn far more about his character than in any version of the script before that.

One impression people have of Hollywood is quite wrong. People often think that Hollywood is full of people who are determined to ruin every project they touch. That’s just false. I’ve never met anybody who was not actively trying to make every movie the best it can possibly be. They pour their hearts into these projects. Often they’re wrong, and often the people who are least prepared to create a great film are in control of the money and get their way a bit too much. But nobody’s trying to make a stinker. More to the point, I have found many talented, sincere, dedicated, brilliant, self-sacrificing, generous people in Hollywood, inside and outside the studios, and as long as I spend my time working with them, the collaborative aspects of film-making are a joy. The people who are slimy, tyrannical, deceitful, larcenous, etc., I walk away from and never look back. Life is too short to let them shape my experience of the filmmaking art. I have surrounded myself with goodness as well as greatness in the people I work with, so that when we finally do get a film made, I can remember every part of the process with fondness and pride. And if we never get a film made — well, I’ve had fifty or so books published and that ain’t nothin’.