A Character With Your Voice

I believe I've mentioned one of several "enigmas of writing" in this blog, but just in case...there are many enigmas of writing in my eyes. Lemme 'splain what this means to me.

Writing is a delicate process. It's the fine tuning of what you want to say, and what the reader wants to hear. Entire books have been made as allegories for some greater message, because it's not as simple as explaining it verbatim; sometimes you have to sell it.

It's something that I don't mind, as long as I'm not being jerked around by the author. An author like Matthew "fucking" Stover would never go so far as to dropkick you with the message he's trying to get across; he puts it in there, and you only see it if you want to. There are others where that's all they do is take you aside and tell you: "Here's how the world works, in my humble opinion." Nothing's wrong with either approach, to me. That's how literature works. But there are some that just baffle me. Their approach is caught in the middle. They are the enigmas.

Orson Scott Card is one of these enigmas. To me, at least.

My first experience with OSC was near the end of high school. My friend let me borrow a copy of Ender's Game and it was one of the few books that I've read in just a couple days. I loved that book. It inspired me so damn much. That book became one of the "Holy Trinity" for me: the works that inspired me to be a writer. It takes its place up there along side R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale Trilogy and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Of course, I did the only logical thing a person in my position would do: I went out and bought the sequel! Speaker for the Dead, it was called, and I read it front to back during our annual trip to Yosemite. It wasn't that it was a bad book or that it was terribly written. Actually, it was far from it. The thing that confused me was that the book didn't feel like a sequel. It didn't seem like this book had any place in Ender's story. It didn't seem like it was Ender that I was even reading about!

It was an odd thing. A very odd experience. Speaker for the Dead is still a really good book, in my opinion, but still.

Then, I did the only logical thing from there, and I went and bought the third book, called Xenocide. Then, something terrible happened:

After reading Ender's Game and placing it among the most influential works to ever come into my life; after reading Speaker for the Dead front to back in a couple days during a goddamn Yosemite trip...I was twenty pages into Xenocide when I said, "Done."

There wasn't just something off about this third book in the series, there was something fucking degenerate about it. The entire first part of the book is a dialogue between two random characters about the finer points of Buddhism. Now, I had just taken an Intro to Philosophy class, and while I can't say I'm well versed in that life-style, it seemed like OSC had done the same thing I had: taken an intro course and got to work writing.

I was dumbfounded. How could this happen? How could a series that had been so inspirational to me so suddenly take a turn for the worse?

After...years of research (not consecutively, of course. I don't have a lab set up for stuff like this), I've discovered what so many others have discovered about OSC: he sets up a good universe--a popular universe--then hijacks his own characters and has them do the talking for his beliefs.

Is this a good thing, though? Ender was nothing more than an innocent boy in the first book. Sure, there were probably some Mormon undertones there, but I didn't catch them. Looking back at Speaker for the Dead, they're as plain as the sun in the daytime...and that's plain. Ender travels to a Portuguese colony in space and changes their lives with a new way of thinking, much like the Mormons attempt to do. The message being, the only way to change a culture is to completely understand it. No one knew why the Piggies acted the way they did, then Ender shows up, does a little digging and everyone gets along.

Again, is this right? If you establish a character a certain way and a certain tone, are you allowed, as the author, to completely change the story arc's meaning? Is this an integrity thing, or is this an "I wrote it, so I have a right to direct the story in this way" thing?

OSC has fans--some very dedicated ones--but could his works have been more respected had they not been hijacked in such a way. For those who are only aware of OSC, Ender's Game is always the book they know him for. Not the Shadow Saga, not the Alvin Maker Series, or the Homecoming Saga...Ender's Game.

Was it an opportunity missed, or just the way the chips fell? Should he be praised for getting his views out through his stories, or crucified for such a blatant hijacking? I don't know. Maybe nothing's wrong with it. Maybe everything's wrong with it.

I might never know, but I'll keep researching in the meantime. Back to the lab!