Orson Scott Card interview

Ghostwriter

ORSON SCOTT CARD: "Learn Everything About Everything"
By Scott Nicholson (photo by Amy Terrell)

Orson Scott Card has written nearly forty science fiction, fantasy, historical and mainstream novels as well as numerous plays. He won back-to-back Hugo and Nebula awards for Ender's Game and Speaker For The Dead. Card is author of the writing instruction books How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy and Character and Viewpoint and also teaches writing workshops. Despite being a highly prolific writer, he's very generous with his time and opinions.

Scott Nicholson: What advice do you have for new writers?

Orson Scott Card: The first piece of advice I can give you is, for heaven's sake, don't get caught up in the same careerist path that the rest of America's getting sucked into. Don't assume you have to have a college degree, or reach a certain age, or have approval from an editor or writer. Just tell your stories.

They'll be bad at first, but you'll never learn from classes, and you'll certainly never learn from literature classes. My advice is to train yourself as a writer. Start writing now, even if it's terrible. Just tell the story, what happens and why.

Don't think about style, because your true style, you already have. All you need to think about is writing clearly so that you can communicate your story. You'll be surprised at how much style your stories have, just how naturally your true voice emerges. If you try to cultivate a "good style" or a "high style" or a "style like so-and-so," all you'll end up being is a creator of derivative crap.

My feeling is that you just need to keep writing until you find your audience. You're lucky if that audience happens to include a well-placed editor early in your career, but sometimes it doesn't. But if it's worth doing, you just keep doing it.

If you're writing science fiction, you do have to read widely in the field. The Hugo anthologies, the Best-of-the-Year anthologies, the Hugo winners or not, just whatever's appealing to you. That's just the beginning. Then, as you progress as a writer, you have to start reading what's completely uninteresting to you. If you see a gap in your knowledge, you must fill it. The education you need is to learn everything about everything, and I mean that quite seriously.

SN: By "everything," I assume you include history, since you use so much of it in your work.

OSC:I just don't understand how you can write fiction and not love to explore human behavior. In the case studies, rather than the philosophical texts. Reading psychology and sociology doesn't do it. Reading history gives you the raw data, and the rawer the better. I love the "way of life" books that give you the day-to-day culture.

The people who don't read history are condemned to only writing contemporary fiction. Because then the only thing they know is what they've observed with their own eyes. You know, you don't observe that much. In your own life, you're constantly distracted by your own biases. That's why you have so many novels by literary writers that basically sneer at anybody who hasn't been to the university. The result is that they write false fiction that serves to stroke the over-educated rather than to really explore human life.

Formless poetic writing lets you spew emotions, but formal poetic writing allows you to really pull from deep within your unconscious self. Not the feelings you're aware of, but the feelings you're unaware of. In the process of fitting to a form or working those details of real history into your work, it forces you to imagine things you never would have imagined otherwise. That's when you start finding beliefs you didn't know you had are coming to the surface.

SN: Do you think writers have an obligation to give moral instruction, or is that a natural result of storytelling?

OSC: It's not a matter of obligation. You can't tell a story without giving moral instruction. It's the ignorant writer who pretends not to be including moral instruction in his novel. They believe what they believe so intensely that it doesn't occur to them that it's just a belief. They don't think to question it.

There is no storytelling that doesn't include normative elements. In fact, I go farther and say that is the primary business of storytelling. It's the reason why people will skip lunch in order to use the money to buy a book or see a movie, or watch television when they should be making money. Because we hunger for stories, and the hunger we have is to give meaning to life. To tell us why things happen, how things work, what human life is for.

SN: Now for more practical advice. Is there value in workshops?

OSC: Some writers need workshops. The workshop is valuable not because of what other people think about your story; that is almost worthless. In fact, most of the time what they tell you is less than worthless. You just can't pay any attention to anything they say becuse they're so idiotically wrong.

What you take the workshop for is to have a deadline to make you write your stories, to have an audience whether they understand the story or not, and then, to be able to read their terrible stories. For the purpose of the workshop, you only give them the raw response to their story. You never try and diagnose. For yourself, you then start thinking, "Okay, how could I have solved this problem? Where did this writer trip up? What would I have done?"

There's no workshop you should belong to for more than a year. After a year, you've learned everything you're going to learn from these other writers. After that, it's just a social club.

SN: Do you think beginning writers should look for agents?

OSC: For novels in the science fiction and fantasy fields, you want an agent only when you are sent your first contract. Then, you want an agent to help you negotiate. Not to get more money, but to protect your foreign rights and film rights, to make sure the options clause is not too onerous, to make sure you have a reversions clause. To make sure that, if possible, you get a time limit on the right to publish the books. After so many years, if the book's a hit, you get to renegotiate.

As soon as you step outside of science fiction and fantasy, the rules change. The publishers are using the agents as their first readers, and that's why the agents are getting a higher percentage, I suppose. Because they have to read so much more dreck and sort it out. Basically, what they're doing is forcing the successful writers to subsidize the reading of manuscripts. The bottom-line guys discovered that's just one more expense that publishers can shove off on the writers.

And the agents who play along with it and take their fifteen percent? I don't think they're doing anything more for the writer at fifteen percent than they ever did before. There's no new service being provided. The agents basically all colluded to charge fifteen percent, and the writers lived with it.

But if the writers all said, "No, I will work only with a ten-percent agent," eventually we'd have our way. Agents don't exist without writers. The new writers are always more eager to sell their work with a fifteen percent discount, or twenty percent, or thirty-- they'd give HALF to the agent-- just for the right to have it sent out. Well, they do themselves no favor, and they do the rest of us no favor, either.

SN: Then I take it you're no fan of agents' reading fees?

OSC: They're thieves. What you're going to get is worth nothing. If they knew so much, every writer they handle would be a bestseller, wouldn't they? The only thing they're going to teach you how to do is write to some imaginary formula.

All I can say is, pay it if that's the only way you can get an agent. But you still have no promise you'll get an agent. You're insane if you rewrite your novel to fit what an agent tells you. Because even if you do exactly what they tell you, they're still not buying the book from you. If the agent tells you to do a rewrite, all the agent is saying is, "I don't want to represent you."

Make sure that if you do get a fifteen-percenter that you have no time-limit clause. That you can fire them at any point. You don't need to sign something like that. Agents who are any good don't need to ask for two years or one year. If they were any good, they would be ashamed to ask for that.

The real secret is, wherever you're mailing your book out, be working on the next one, so that you're not spending all your time worrying about the previous one. Just keep putting them out there.

SN: Some say book publishing is a dying industry, with blockbuster deals and bidding wars but no midlist. What do you think?

OSC: For one thing, I was hearing that twenty years ago, the same argument with the same evidence. Second, what really happens is that book publishers kill themselves, but they don't kill book publishing.

Between those words of doom and the present, you have Tom Doherty who started a paperback house, which is now a hardcover and paperback house, in an era when everybody figured that the market was full and there was no room for another house. The reason there was room for another house was that the big guys had been buying up other publishing companies. When they do, they hope to achieve economies of scale, so they combine, say, the science fiction lines of three houses. But they try to do it with the same editor.

They eventually end up publishing one-third as many books. It's a diminishing-value situation; the very act of buying other houses destroys their value. So the publishers shoot themselves in the foot, and all they do is open the door for new publishers to come in and fill the niche.

SN: Do you think the speculative genres will remain strong?

OSC: Genres come and go. There's been an attempt to create a horror genre, but in fact, the audience for that is not reliable. You find some horror writers with a strong following, but you don't find that many people going in and buying whatever horror novel just came out. It will probably just be a subset of science fiction and fantasy, as it probably should be, or a subset of mainstream thriller. Which is what happens to all writers of speculative fiction who make it big. They cease being science fiction and fantasy writers and become "bestselling" writers.

That doesn't mean that a genre won't lose fashion. Science fiction, for all we know, might be fading already, as it breaks off into military sci-fi, media sci-fi, and artsy sci-fi. There's precious little left in the middle where I am.

SN: Do you see interactive media taking a slice out of the book pie?

OSC: The book pie is the book pie. It's about the size it was before movies and television were even invented. We had a huge short story market, and television basically killed the magazines. Sometimes a new medium can defeat an old one.

In the case of games, the most popular ones are not interactive at all. They are the ones in which a player is trained to follow a certain set of behaviors until he achieves a reward at the end.

Now what does that tell you about what people are going for? They're going for authority, an author. That's also what people look for in stories. When you read fiction, somebody tells you, "This is where it begins, this is the stuff that matters, this is how it ends, and this is what it all means." If a book can end in any one of eighteen different ways, depending on how you choose, your hunger to have an author tell you what happens and why is defeated because you recognize that you're the one doing the telling. If you come to a book hungry for answers, you come away only with what you already had.

The Internet won't kill book publishing. Books by e-mail? You have to download it, then you have to print it out onto what? 8 and 1/2" x 11" paper? Oh, THAT'S a convenient size. We'll love carrying that around everywhere we go. You can die when it falls over on your face while you're asleep.

SN: What do you think of "the writing life"?

OSC: Writing's lonely. Sometimes you've got to go out and meet some people. But the saddest writers are the ones who hang out with other writers. You end up writing books about writers because that's all you know. You're much better off if you have friends who aren't university-educated, who are just real people doing regular jobs. Then, even if you're not a good writer, you'll still be a good person, so your life is worth living.

My audience could disappear tomorrow. But my children will still be my children. My wife will still be my wife. My friends are still my friends, regardless of what my books do. I just think it's better to fail as a writer and succeed as a human being than to succeed as a writer and fail as a human being.

Visit OSC's site Hatrack River

BACK TO MORE INTERVIEWS AT GHOSTWRITER