Card, Orson Scott

OSC: I enjoyed my time in the low-residence MFA writing program at Queens University. There were fine teachers in the poetry and screenwriting areas, where I took part. I regret that I wasn’t able to keep up with the time requirements; I found myself treating the program and the other writers with less respect than they deserved, in terms of turning in my work on time, and so I dropped out.

That said, I must point out that most creative writing programs are like most vocal music programs in college: As the vocal music program is designed to turn out opera singers, for which there is little demand, so the creative writing program is designed to turn out literary writers, for which there is almost no public demand. The result is that most university creative writing programs are designed to teach the next generation of creative writing teachers, because that’s the only way they’ll be able to make a living. The general public won’t pay to read their books and stories because they are trained not to speak to or please that very public. In fact, they are trained to despise and shut out the general public, writing coded fiction that can only be understood with professorial intervention.

I’ve never understood the point of that. The great writers in every era wrote in order to be understood. Shakespeare’s work was absolutely comprehensible to the groundlings and played lickety-split on a bare stage in the hot sun. Creative writing programs prepare you to create work designed to be studied. But, ironically, the only work worthstudying is the fiction whose first concern is storytelling. This doesn’t mean that every work must aim at the lowest common denominator — far from it. It only means that a creative writing program is only useful to the degree that it helps you develop a tool set for telling the stories you believe in and care about to the widest audience possible for that story. Most creative writing programs do the opposite. Most creative writing teachers have no idea of the damage they’re doing, since they are wounded themselves and think the wounds and maimings are their badges of honor. But they’re not.

So I tell writers who ask me what they should study in college:

1. Why are you going to college? No one in publishing will ask you or care whether you’ve got a degree. All that matters is the manuscript. Are you writing? How many novels have you finished? If you’re not writing, why does it matter what you’re studying in college? You’re not a writer anyway.

2. So you’re going to college so you can get a job to support your writing hobby, and you want to major in something that won’t interfere with the writing you’re doing anyway. In that case, major in something that will lead you to or qualify you for a job that you can stand doing, a job you’ll enjoy, because if you hate your day job, you’ll be so ground down that it will be all the harder for you to do your writing on the side. The kinds of jobs that actually require a college education are often the very jobs that exhaust the part of your mind that writes. Waiting tables or fixing cars or plumbing or firefighting are much better day jobs for a writer, because they enrich your understanding of human nature while not exhausting the storytelling part of your mind.

3. But if you must get that college degree in order to lead the middle-class lifestyle to which your parents expect you to aspire or else they’ll think they failed as parents, what majors will actually help you become a better writer, here’s the list:

History. Nothing else will teach you half so much about what people actually did and how different cultures actually worked. The problem is that a history major is also about historiography, which is fascinating in itself but will distract you; and history majors will require you to specialize in one period, which is death to the writer — you must endeavor your whole life to know everything about everything.

Liberal Arts/Humanities/General Studies. If you can get a non-major major, what used to be called a “liberal arts education,” then you’ll be getting a realcollege education. Not aimed at the job market, this education will give you the broadest possible base in our culture and help you become adaptable, help you reframe everything in useful ways. You can tell your parents that it’s “pre-law.” Everything is pre-law.

Business. Business is about making money, but making money comes from pleasing people, and pleasing people only happens when you understand them. Management is about working with people and trying to create functional communities. Most business programs are hopelessly inept at preparing people for any of these functions, but the point is you’ll get a degree that puts you in the workplace with a marketable degree — yet in a position where you are constantly meeting and trying to understand new people in order to work with them and help meet their needs. This is great preparation for a writer. And your parents will be happy because you might actually make a living before your writing career takes off.

BWG: You also have an online magazine: InterGalactic Medicine Show. Is this a venue that looks favorably on submissions from new writers?

OSC: Short stories are the best place for exciting new voices to be discovered. Books are a huge investment for writer and publisher alike. So the death of the short story market is a serious blow to the community of writers, since it was the out-of-town tryouts from which new novelists were born. In books, it’s so much easier to look for books that resemble last year’s hit, since that will be easier to sell and it will be a surer way to get a good return on the investment. Short stories give you a portfolio to show what your storytelling looks like, to help develop and audience, to sharpen your skills, and to give publishers the confidence that your more original voice will also find an audience they can sell to over time.

So as the print magazines have faded, dropping to shockingly low levels of sales, I felt a need to create a new market, especially aimed at clear, non-artsy storytelling — stories aimed at the general audience. With editor Edmund Schubert’s strong guidance, we’ve created a magazine that I’m very proud of, and we’re constantly discovering new writers.

We also have a staff of underpaid assistant editors who devote far more time and intelligence than we can afford to pay for in search of those exciting new writers who make our enterprise worth doing: Sara Ellis, Scott Roberts, Eric James Stone, Chris Bellamy. These are talented, accomplished writers in their own right. They do get a benefit that is often unnoticed: You learn far more about writing from reading bad or almost-good stories than you do from reading good and great ones. Why? Because the great stories inspire imitation, but the failed stories prompt you to understand ways that a story can go wrong, and how they might be fixed so they do work. I know I learned as much about writing from my stint as an assistant editor/rewriter at the Ensignmagazine as from anything else I did.

We also illustrate every story in IGMS. Nobody does that anymore. But we think paying artists to visualize moments from the story or encapsulate the feeling of the story in an image is also worth doing.

BWG: Which authors have most influenced your writing and your career?

OSC: Influence, to the degree that it is conscious, is imitation, and it is not helpful. It is for scholars and readers to speculate about influences. However, I have lived long enough to read or hear some of those speculations, which are sometimes dead on, though I was certainly unaware of it at the time.

For instance, Michael Collings pointed out that, especially at the ends of stories, chapters, or novels, I sometimes use cadences that scan like blank verse. I realized that he’s right — in fact, sometimes I was consciously doing it. But the reason only became clear when he pointed it out: I not only read and studied Shakespeare, I also wrote many plays in blank verse before my fiction writing began, and I resort to techniques I developed there. Blank verse flows out of me like a sigh, and just as Shakespeare would clinch a scene with rhyme, I will clinch a chapter with cadenced language.

Another thing Collings pointed out was the influence of Joseph Smith’s writing. This is a certainty — I read the Book of Mormon from an early age, over and over. But Joseph Smith was himself echoing the language of the King James Version of the Bible — the language that felt high and scriptural to English-speakers at the time he was translating the Book of Mormon. And since I was reading the KJV as much as the Book of Mormon, I have to say it’s really the KJV that’s the source, directly and indirectly, of my tendency, when I’m writing something Really Important — either to me or to the characters — I resort to language that echoes the KJV, not via archaicisms but in the formality of grammar.

However, it’s also true that I simply love language, so that while the KJV and Joseph Smith are in my bones because of early childhood and lifelong reading, it is also true that I have made grammar, etymology, and the history of language my constant study. I love the subjunctive, and while I have the self-restraint to use it only when it’s truly needed, I use it absolutely correctly. I know when and how “whom” should be used, and it grates on me that most writers use it incorrectly.

(My suggestion: “Whom” is disappearing from the language exactly as “ye” has disappeared, and writers will do far better to acknowledge this and never use “whom,” rather than to humiliate themselves by inserting it where it doesn’t belong. Most writers blow it far more than half the time and would be, on average, far more “correct” to ignore “whom” entirely.)

Within the field of sci-fi and fantasy, I can look back and see that the absolute clarity of Isaac Asimov was an aspiration. No one talks of Asimov as having a “style,” but he had a superb one, as close to perfection as I’ve ever seen. You never have to reread a passage of Asimov to figure out what’s going on. You slide through his English with perfect comprehension.

At the same time, I also aspired to, or at least felt that I had permission from, the cadenced language of Ray Bradbury. It’s ironic that it was not in his poetry but his prose that Bradbury was most poetic. (His poetry is conceptual and scans badly; it does not flow with the music of his narrative.)

I have learned from Harlan Ellison the usefulness of the foreword and afterword, in which he talks personally to the reader about the fiction. Yes, I also read George Bernard Shaw’s similar self-commentaries, but what I learned from Ellison was that you don’t have to take Shaw’s lofty, superior position — you can use a rhetoric of equality, treating the reader as a partner in the fictional enterprise. Indeed, I think it is this partnering attitude that makes Ellison so perfectly accessible in his fiction, even when his stories are at their most difficult. Ellison knows that his stories only come into real existence when readers form them in their minds, and as a writer it is his job, not to dazzle them, but to guide them into building a compelling world filled with people they believe in and care about.

Unfortunately, any list of “influences” usually devolves into a list of “favorites.” I would love to think that my lifelong reading of Jane Austen has rubbed off on me, that I learned from Twain, that there are echoes of all the greats in my work. But I fear that is only wishful thinking. For all I know, I learned most from Thornton W. Burgess and Joseph Altsheler. I know that Nordhoff and Hall were an influence. One story by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. — “Tunesmith” — was so evocative that, having forgotten the story itself (it took years to refind it), I rewrote it as one of my best short stories, “unaccompanied Sonata.”

Maybe “influence” is better understood by tracking which childhood readings framed my understanding of the world. In which case, fiction writers need not apply. The most powerful books I read as a child were William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Bruce Catton’s trilogy The Army of the Potomac. Along with scripture, these books did more to frame my conception of the world than any others. My sense of tragedy comes from Shirer; everything I know about leadership and war, about failure and success, comes from Catton.

But we can’t neglect that scriptural influence. From childhood on, I heard and understood this passage from Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants, an LDS scripture: “We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.” How many of my stories take this as a guiding principle in developing the choices of my characters? Even characters with good intentions succumb to this. Ender Wiggin wrestles with it; so does Alvin Miller.

I go further: LDS scripture absolutely rejects capitalism, Mitt Romney to the contrary notwithstanding. Yet the laws of the free market are irresistible, and Mormon experiments with a commune economy failed when they ran up against those laws. Instead, LDS culture has developed in ways that subvert and triumph over the dog-eat-dog laws of economics. I have lived my life among men and women who aspire to be, not Economic Man, but Consecrated Soul. I have seen the communitarian commitment triumph again and again over the impulse toward “enlightened self-interest,” with a result that is far happier than any I’ve ever seen from the economic model. What no one understood about Mitt Romney was that he got rich because he played well in a game whose only markers were money; he actually lives a Mormon life, regarding neither his time nor his money as belonging to himself. In that he is far from remarkable — it’s how we all live.

That shows up in my fiction, over and over. I was once given a libertarian fiction award, and I didn’t understand why. I am the opposite of a libertarian — though I value actual liberty far more than most libertarians I’ve known. Community requires sacrifice of some personal desires in order to sustain the circumstances in which greater happiness and fulfilment are available to all. If there is anything my fiction is about, in story after story, it is this. No, I must correct that — my fiction isn’t about that, it is simply taken for granted as the way the universe works. Because it does work that way. The more I study human evolution, the more I realize that we evolved as communities and cultures, not as individuals, because it is in the community life that the individual has the best chance of thriving long enough to reproduce. And the better the community at accomplishing this, the better the chance of the community itself surviving over the long term (and vice versa).

Again, I was aware of exactly none of these influence when I started out, though all of them were present in my first plays, stories, audioplays, books. I can only discuss them now because I’ve lived long enough to have some perspective on my own life and works, and to have the advantage of others’ commentaries on them.

And I must say that this awareness of influence can be intimidating. Do I embrace the influence or do I then move away from it? I still use cadenced language when appropriate, but only because I continue not to think about language while writing; I still think only about what happens and why, and most let language take care of itself. So it still takes care of itself in the accustomed ways.

But I do strive not to bend my characters to make the spokespeople for my own beliefs. I rigorously make them say what they believe and talk about what they care about. And I present their ideas fairly — in the terms that they use to think about them. I try never to stack the deck against them. In this I learned explicitly from Shakespeare. He put some of his most quotable lines in the mouth of Polonius, a buffoon. Chances are, you’ll only hear my beliefs spoken by fools and failures in my fiction. I never want my stories to be read only by people who already agree with me.

Yet I also see in the lines of people gathering at book signings that the communitarian underpinning of my fiction is fully effective. People who like my stories well enough to want their books signed tend to be almost pathologically communitarian. Bookstore owners and employees repeatedly tell me how nice the people who come to my signings are. Not that other writers attract crowds of hooligans, but rather everyone seems to be looking out for the other guy, doing their best to make everything work well for everyone. Communitarian. My people.

BWG: What words of wisdom would you give to emerging writers?

OSC: If you’ve been in a writing group for more than a year, you have already learned everything you’re going to learn from them — either from their comments on your work, or from your own analyses of theirs. After that, a writing group is just a social club or, worse (and more commonly), what you do instead of publishing. You start to write for the group instead of for the real-world audience; you start to think you need to do what they suggest, instead of staying true to your own vision of the story. Both have deadly results.

So get out. I’m not saying snub them or be rude. I’m saying, Stop taking your stories to them. See them socially and root for them and, if you have time and they ask you to, look at their stories privately and make whatever comments you want. But stop taking part in the safe, comfortable rituals of workshopping with those same people. Even if they’re all better writers than you, they are holding you back.

I speak from the experience of watching extremely talented writers confine themselves in the workshop box, endlessly rewriting to please a tiny audience that is no longer capable of giving a fresh reading to anything their group produces. Writing workshops should create themselves with a term limit. Just as you must stop taking painkillers when the wound has healed, you must stop taking any particular workshop when that first rush of excitement and novelty has passed. If you go on beyond that point, it’s an addiction and will only harm you.