On Writing: A Small Epiphany

For the past year or so, each time we went on a trip—Hawai’i, California, St. Louis, back to Hawai’i over Christmas, and again to California this week—I’ve been carrying two paperbacks with me, fully intending to read them and fill in a huge gap in my science-fiction background. Those books are Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. Late this afternoon, I finally—finally!—started reading the former.

Card is a contemporary of mine—he’s three, maybe four years older than I am, so we share some similar life experiences, although from different perspectives. He’s a Utah Mormon and graduate of Brigham Young University in the early ’70s; I’m a California Protestant (as much or as little as anything else, I suppose) and a graduate of UCLA, Class of ’74.

We both observed how the Vietnam War affected this country, from a fairly conservative viewpoint (I’ve since become less conservative and more libertarian, but that’s a story for another time). I only include this tidbit to validate that we are not only close in age, but we also held fairly parallel world views 35 to 40 years ago.

We were also exposed to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy at about the same age. While Asimov has always been my very favorite author of any genre (and I have enjoyed his nonfiction and contemporary mysteries every bit as much as I have his science fiction), it is clear from Card’s Introduction to my version of Ender’s Game that, in the final analysis, Asimov—and specifically, the Foundation series—had a life-changing effect on him.

In that introduction, Card wrote a paragraph that gave me pause—literally: I put down the book, grabbed my laptop, fired up Ommwriter, and pounded out this article.

What did Card say that has moved me so much? Nothing I haven’t read before in other places; however, this time, the light bulb went on. I internalized the words; in short, I had at least a mini-epiphany. Here is what Card said: 

I learned…to shape a scene, how to build tension, and–above all–the necessity of being harsh with your own material, excising or rewriting anything that doesn’t work. I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn—that there are a  thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

And there was my "Ah hah!" moment: I am a good writer. I can express my thoughts clearly and (as warranted) concisely. I spell exceptionally well; my grammar and syntax are generally correct; my lexicon is large enough that I can effectively tailor my delivery to fit my audience, regardless of age, background, or experience.

But, so far, I’m not a very good storyteller. However, I now know, thanks to Mr. Card, that writing and telling stories are—or can be—two sides of the same coin. Now I grok Tami’s (and others’) constant exhortations to "Just write!" Pour out the words, let the thoughts erupt without regard to how they fall and flow: There is time enough once the tale is writ, to clean it up, clear it up, and make it a story.

Ender’s Game

Speaker for the Dead