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OSC Answers Questions
QUESTION:
I was wondering how long it took you to write the Ender Series and how much
you like it compared to the rest of your work that you've done in your career?
What is your favorite series that you have written as of now?
-- Submitted by Ryan Bane
OSC REPLIES:
Each book in the Ender series has its own history. "Ender's Game" began when
I was sixteen and thought of the idea of the battle school as a way to train
soldiers for 3-D combat without the risk of them flying off into space when they
make mistakes. Later, when I was 24, I finally thought of the idea of having the
soldiers at battle school be children, and then I wrote the story in two days.
With a few revisions later at Ben Bova's request, the story was published in
Analog in 1977, and was popular enough to be included in several anthologies.
In about 1979, I started working on an idea for a novel about a world in which
warfare is an essential step in the reproductive cycle of an alien species -- the
idea that would give rise to the piggies in Speaker for the Dead. I was also
working on the idea of someone who sings at funerals, and thought of combining
the ideas into one novel. My wife informed me that I'd done enough stories
about music -- and I knew she was right. So I changed it to "Speaker of Death"
and there the idea sat for a couple of years. Then, in 1981, I realized that if the
speaker of death were Ender Wiggin, long, long after the events in Ender's
Game, the story really worked. With that premise, I sold the book to Tom
Doherty for his new publishing company, TOR.
But writing Speaker for the Dead (as it was now called) gave me fits, and the
reason was simple: Getting from the end of Ender's Game to the beginning of
the real story of Speaker for the Dead was taking way, way too long. The best
solution was to rewrite the story "Ender's Game" -- and the best way to do that
was to adapt it to a novel. So Tom agreed to add Ender's Game to the contract
and I set out to write the novel. As is usual with my books, I wrote the first
several short chapters and then waited a few weeks -- in this case to do a book
signing tour for my novel Saints -- before returning to the book. So I spent a
week writing the opening, and then three more weeks writing the rest of the
book.
Then, after writing Wyrms as sort of a "warm-up" to the concept of the
Descolada, which was now threatening to take over Speaker for the Dead, I set
out to write Speaker. I got about a hundred and twenty pages into it, when
Gregg Keizer, a friend and fellow editor at Compute! Books in Greensboro, made
it clear that he couldn't tell the characters apart -- the novel wasn't working. I
threw it out and began again, earlier in the story. This time, with Novinha as
the root of the story, I was able to finish. Again, one week for the opening I
threw away, then about three weeks, maybe a bit longer, to write the rest of the
book.
Xenocide and Children of the Mind were supposed to be one volume, based on
an idea I'd pitched to Jim Frenkel at Dell, called "Philotes." I wasn't ready to
write it then; not till my agent sold the "Ender trilogy" in England and I kind of
had to come up with a third volume did that idea come back to the surface. It
took several years before I was ready to write it even then, however, and as I got
to about 100,000 words and realized that I was only a quarter of the way through
the outline, I realized something had to give. Furthermore, while I knew where
the Han Qing-jao storyline was going, I had not yet clearly resolved what would
happen once certain characters appeared "outside." So I called Beth Meacham
and made sure it was all right for me to split the book in half. The Han
Qing-jao storyline would provide the closure for this book, while the emergence
of the characters who appear at the end would be the cliffhanger setup for
completion of that story. It took about a month and a half to write Xenocide.
Again, years passed, until I was able to begin Children of the Mind, having
found my way into it through some thoughts I'd had about Japanese culture and
the way power sometimes seems to be located in places different from what seems
to be the case. This novel was written under very odd circumstances. I had
begun it (as usual) and worked on it for a week when I had to go to San Rafael to
work on the dialogue for a LucasArts computer game. Mornings I would go to
the office and write dialogue for "The Dig," then afternoons I would come back
to my hot hotel room (a lovely old-fashioned hotel, but no air-conditioning, and
it was June) and write Children of the Mind, then spend the evening playing Sid
Meier's "Colonization" -- three completely different projects. But in a month, I
had finished both the game and the book.
As to how much I like the Ender series, I can only say that every book
represented an attempt to tell a story I cared about and believed in as clearly and
powerfully as possible. There's not a book I've written in which I have not
found flaws, but in every case it was the best I could do at the time I wrote it.
The five series I've worked with in my career -- Ender, Alvin, Homecoming,
Mayflower, and Pastwatch -- each have their own reason for being and there are
things I love about them all. Ender allowed me to explore the meaning of
humanity and how we judge each other. Alvin is my chance to explore the
history of the American community -- plus it's plain fun to write. Homecoming
was my exploration of the Book of Mormon as well as a serious effort at working
out how communities function and form and collapse. Mayflower is a
revolutionary story in the midst of a paean to smalltown life. Pastwatch allows
me to address key points in history, a sort of historical "Just-So" story. I love
doing all these things. At the same time, if any of these series ever became
repetitive, the same book over and over, I'd quit doing it. It's only because each
novel in the series stands alone, with new issues to explore and new characters to
work with, that I can enjoy writing them. None is my favorite; all are my
favorite.
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