tableau: Your character dialogue is saturated with sarcasm, the calling card of 20-year-olds. How do you give your characters an age-specific voice?
Orson Scott Card: I don't really think of "age-specific" voices. Just of attitudes and relationships. When I'm writing dialogue, it's as if I'm an actor improvising what they'll say to each other. I can't plan it ahead, because it's only when I've thought of one person's way of speaking that I can then come up with the other person's response. [It's] very complicated and most of the process is intuitive.
How does your religion affect your writing?
I keep my religious ideas -- like my political ideas -- out of my writing, at least in the sense that I'm not proselytizing to try to get people to agree with me. Instead, I show what the characters believe about religion and politics and other issues and have them explain their ideas to others as the need arises in a story. Thus I'm amused to find people quoting my characters as if their beliefs were mine. When I want to write about religion or politics, I write essays. When I want to write fiction, I only allow my own beliefs to creep in unconsciously, in the choices I make without realizing I'm making them. What comes into my novels without my awareness is more likely to reflect my deepest beliefs rather than my current opinions. I trust those to be part of the truth of my fiction; my current conscious opinions have no place there.
Some authors personally identify with their protagonist or supporting characters. Do you identify with one of your characters more than others?
I identify with all my characters, even the most repulsive ones. How can I devise what they will do, say, think, without getting inside them exactly as I get inside my more "friendly" characters?
On the cover of Shadow of the Giant, your name is larger than the title. What are the characteristics of an Orson Scott Card novel?
The size of typeface on the book cover is something the publisher decides. What makes a book an Orson Scott Card novel is that I wrote it. I hope I have never written the same book twice, and I hope it is not easy or even worth attempting to try to categorize some element (other than the English language) that all my novels have in common.
Ender's Game was and is a financially successful book, and you keep busy with its movie adaptation and videogames like Advent Rising. Why are you still writing?
There are degrees of success. Ender's Game and its sequels have sold reasonably well, as have most of my other books. But this is not Oprah-level income. It's not Stephen King-level income. If I go a year without writing a new book to keep sales of my older books alive, finances get very tight. If I did that for a couple years, I'd have to lay off my few employees; if I did it for longer than that, I'd have to get an honest job. People assume that because a writer's work is somewhat popular, the writer is rich. That just isn't so.
How will your novels be read in a hundred years?
I have no idea if my novels will be read in a hundred years. I'm just happy they're being read right now.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
