Interviews with OSC • PreAP- Mr. Card Responds -- Sterbenz's Student Blog 7 April 2011 • Buggers and Pathfinders–Orson Scott Card -- Interview with David Steffen 25 January 2010 • OSC Interview at National Review Online 2008 • Q&A with Orson Scott Card -- The full interview text June 2006 • E3 2005 Orson Scott Card Interview 2005 • OSC Interview by John C. Snider. April 2005 • Ender's Game Q&A 2004 • Ender's Game questions from a student in Singapore 2004 • Interview with Sonja 2004 • MBA Class Interview - Dartmouth College 2004 • Orson Scott Card interview in French 2003 • OSC interview about Advent Rising. Interview at gamepro.com September 19, 2003 • OSC interview with a French magazine August 2003 • OSC answers questions about achieving a successful film based on a book 2003 • If you speak Polish, here's an interview with OSC published by the magazine Esensja 2002 • Interview by Kristin Galetta and Justin Goldner October 2002 • Interview from Poland January 17, 2002 • Questions from Playwriting Student Darren Pine April 2001 • Various Student Interviews With OSC  1  |  2  |  3 • Publishers Weekly Talks with Orson Scott Card November 2000 • A Conversation With Orson Scott Card - by Claire E. White September 1999 • CARD'S GAME: An Interview With Orson Scott Card - by Scott Nicholson 1998 • An Interview With Orson Scott Card - by Jeff Duke 1997 • AOL Interview January 19, 1994

Card's work is quite diverse. The Homecoming Saga (the novels The Memory of Earth, The Call of Earth, The Ships of Earth, Earthfall, and Earthborn) was a retelling of ancient scripture as science fiction. Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is an alternate history novel, in which time travelers return to keep Columbus from discovering America -- or at least from returning to Europe after having discovered it. Perhaps Card's most innovative work is his American fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker, whose first five volumes, Seventh Son, Red Prophet, Prentice Alvin, Alvin Journeyman, and Heartfire are set in a magical version of the American frontier.

A dozen of Card's plays have been produced in regional theatre, including the musical Barefoot to Zion (written in collaboration with his composer brother, Arlen L. Card), which played to sold-out houses in Utah as part of the Mormon Church's celebration of the sesquicentennial of the entry of the pioneers into Salt Lake Valley. His historical novel, Saints, has been an underground hit for several years, and Card has written hundreds of audio plays and a dozen scripts for animated video plays for the family market. And his TV series concept, The Gate, was purchased by the WB network for development. Meanwhile, Ender's Game is being developed for film by Robert Chartoff, co-producer of The Right Stuff, Raging Bull, and the Rocky series, with Card writing the screenplay.

Card has written two books on writing: Character and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, the latter of which won a Hugo award in 1991. He has taught writing courses at several universities, including most recently a novel-writing course at Pepperdine, and has also taught at such workshops as Antioch, Clarion, Clarion West, and the Cape Cod Writers Workshop.

Born in Richland, Washington, Card grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He lived in Brazil for two years as an unpaid missionary for the Mormon Church. He received degrees from Brigham Young University (1975) and the University of Utah (1981). He currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. He and his wife, Kristine, are the parents of five children: Geoffrey, Emily, Charles, Zina Margaret, and Erin Louisa (named for Chaucer, Bronte and Dickinson, Dickens, Mitchell, and Alcott, respectively). A devout Mormon, he believes that all fiction has a strong moral message. He believes that the message should be positive; nevertheless, his choice of subject matter and the amount of violence in his books have led to some raised eyebrows in the Mormon church. Card's characters are usually put in a position of having to make difficult and interesting moral choices. Card believes that it is the character's interaction with other people which makes him interesting. Family is also a central theme in his work.

His fans are devout, and growing in number. His website is a popular stop where fans and students can read about his work, and even get their writing questions answered from Uncle Orson. He practices what he preaches -- a devoted husband and father, he makes family time a priority in his life and is known for his willingness to help writers who are willing to work hard. Orson talks with us about his work and his life, and shares some terrific advice for beginning writers.

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My film company had acquired the rights to an idea: Sleeping Beauty wakes up in Russia today. As with many such high-concept ideas, there really wasn't much more to it than that. For me, the fascination was not so much with Sleeping Beauty waking up today or even with the fish-out-of-water scenario of a medieval woman in modern times. I was interested in the call to heroism -- the guy who wakes her thinks he's kissing a princess, but instead he's taking on a full-time -- and lifelong -- job.

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The story required certain things: A reason for him to start a Russian but end up an American; the ability to speak the language of the princess; enough athletic ability to get across the chasm to the princess; a reason to go back to Russia; some ability or abilities that would be useful in fighting the wicked witch. These requirements forced me to move him through an unusual life pattern. To get him from Russia to America, I made him part of the Jewish emigration in the 1970s. To give him Old Slavonic, I made his father a professor of ancient languages who talked shop at home. To get him back to Russia, I made him a grad student -- and to prepare him to understand what was going on, I made him a student of ancient Slavic folklore. And I also made him a lifelong athlete. All these were required by the story, but in the process of making these things fit together into a coherent life with a believable family, I ended up falling in love with Ivan and both his parents -- especially his mother. Ivan's frustration was being misjudged by everyone; but what I admired about him was that no matter what he might wish, he kept coming down on the side of Doing the Right Thing. Not the dramatic battle between Good and Evil, but the quotidian battle between unwillingness and responsibility.

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I wanted to avoid the obvious: Making her anachronistically feminist or modern in some other way. The story only worked if she was a woman of her time. Nor did I want her to be passive, waiting to be rescued. Her people depended on her, and she took her duties seriously in an age when monarchs were not just political but also religious leaders. She had to be in every way the opposite of Baba Yaga -- without being Susan Silverman from the Spenser novels.

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Ivan's parents were very different from mine, and largely unplanned. What mattered to me was simply that they be good parents, in this era when people only seem to write about dysfunctional families -- or erase the family entirely, treating their heroes as if they sprang like Minerva from the head of Jove. So Ivan's parents had to be involved in his life without consuming him with their own ambitions; worried about him but willing to let him make his own choices ... to a point. How do you keep "good parents" from being boring? Well, in truth, the real problem is, how do you keep bad parents from being boring! I've seen the same bad parents in so many books and movies that I'm tired of them. In creating Ivan's family, the "forced conversion" to Judaism was the biggest problem, because it was such a morally complicated thing to do and the level of sincerity in the conversion had to be believable and not utterly cynical. In solving that first dilemma I found the seeds of both parents' relationships with Ivan. In truth, the secret to all characterization for me is expressible in two maxims: Every character is the hero of his own story, and You don't write characters, you write relationships. In practice the first maxim means that you must let characters have their own purposes and agendas, not just do what the plot requires, and the second maxim means that nobody is the same person to everyone -- who they are depends in large part on whom they're with.

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I tried the Internet for research and found it nearly useless. A more experienced friend, D'Ann Stoddard, did manage to find useful information on the manufacture of gunpowder from natural materials. But for myself, I found nothing useful directly. But in an indirect way, the best "find" was through the Internet -- when I got an email from a grad student in Russian studies who was inquiring about my use of Russian words and names in my Homecoming series. I mentioned to her the book I was working on and hired her to read my manuscript and make suggestions. The result was every speck of authenticity on Russian culture and language in the book.

Otherwise, my research was really in the folklore: A collection of Russian folk tales and a collection of Jewish folk tales. These gave me the shape of the story, for Russian folk tales make western European tales look cheery indeed. They have a way of going way beyond the "happily ever after." In one extravagantly vile tale (which I loved) the hero wins the girl's hand in marriage -- but then she tries to kill him! Naturally, I had to use a variation of that one, along with some fun Baba Yaga stuff. And the Jewish folk tales had the recurring theme of a marriage covenant broken -- a betrothal denied, and the punishment that comes until the original betrothal is honored. So that, too, became a complicating element in Enchantment.

Then I also read extensively in early Russian and pre-Russian Slavic history. Not that there's all that much to read! I cite my sources thoroughly in the acknowledgments, which I treat as a bibliography whenever research is important to a book.

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Ender's Game is about a kid fighting a war in space. The sequels -- Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind -- take place three thousand years later! The sequels thus make a trilogy of their own, but Ender's Game has no true sequels in the sense of providing a dose of the same milieu or the same kind of story. That had never bothered me, since I try never to write the same book twice anyway, but as years passed I realized that there were a lot of possibilities in the other kids in Battle School. I had finished with Ender -- he dies well before the end of Children of the Mind -- but I wanted to look at these other children formed and deformed by war. At first I wanted these to be sequels to Ender's Game, but it just didn't work. What finally made it come together was writing the story of Bean (one of Ender's companions) as he experienced the same events that are depicted in Ender's Game. So instead of being a sequel, it's a parallel novel. The challenge then was not to make it Ender Light, but a novel in its own right -- without diminishing the character Ender or the novel Ender's Game in any way. I also wanted to make sure someone who had never read Ender's Game could pick up Ender's Shadow and read it without barriers. We'll see whether I succeeded when the book comes out on August 31st.

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To paraphrase Tolstoy: Good people are endlessly fascinating, but wicked people are all weak, cowardly, or evil in the same old ways. I don't find evil fascinating. I find "There is a myth that 'expressing' or 'fulfilling' an emotion makes it go away, as if humans were balloons that need to vent these gases or explode ... Repression caused us no discernable harm beyond temporary frustration -- and as any good lover knows, temporary frustration is the essence of the art of satisfaction. But massive 'expression' of the 'truth' of violence and sex has caused us great harm." it predictably self-serving. But good people are the ones who struggle to balance their own needs with the needs of loved ones and the communities to which they have given allegiance.

The result of this attitude of mine is that, with rare exceptions, I don't create "pure" villains. Even with Baba Yaga, who is as close to pure evil as I've written, I lay down hints about how she became the woman she is and show how her utter uncompassion allows her to live with herself. Achilles in Ender's Shadow is the "villain," but one gets a clear idea (I hope) that he, like Bean, is a product of survival hunger of the streets. My villains, in short, are heroes of their own stories.

But they're not the heroes of my story. Because my heroes are the ones who keep society running, who hold things together. The Lone Ranger is boring to me, the adolescent who is uninvolved. Indeed, the reason I wrote nothing much about Ender's wandering years (those three thousand years between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead) is because he was that boring Lone Ranger character during that period -- dropping into a community, studying it, intervening, and going away. My heroes are the people who stay and face the consequences of their choices. They're the parents who try to be good to their kids and place them before career or entertainment; they're the spouses who stay together even when adultery calls. Especially in an era when we choose to keep as our president a faithless man who has never met a promise that he even pretends to keep, I feel that the most important thing I can do is show my readers at least one view of what being a grownup is all about.

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There is no inner life of a person in isolation. There is only the life of the individual in relation to others. Inner life is a myth, and a harmful one at that. Studying yourself teaches you nothing about yourself, just as trying to build your self-esteem does nothing for your self-esteem. Only turning outward -- and I mean only turning outward -- gives you a life worth living and a reason for self-esteem and an understanding of what and who you are. I say this as a confirmed introvert (grins). So when I see other writers exploring a person's "feelings," I get impatient. Feelings can be chemically induced; they come and go; they're not any kind of guide to who a person is. Only what a person chooses to do can tell an observer or himself who he is. And since we become different people in every relationship we have, the only way to get any kind of understanding of my main character is by showing him in juxtaposition with many other fully-realized characters. In fiction as in life, we are what we do to others. Jesus was not playing paradoxes when he said that to find your life, you must lose it in the service of others. Nothing is more empty than a person who lives only for himself and seeks to find himself through examination of that empty room.

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There are Mormons who love my work and absolutely get what I'm doing. There are Mormons who think I'm the devil. Oddly enough, "It is impossible to write fiction of any kind that does not make powerful moral statements. But in science fiction, you can transform the 'reality' of the story so as to clarify the issues, allowing the moral dilemma to be brought into sharper relief." the latter category is equally divided between leftwing Mormons who think I'm the devil because I'm so rigidly orthodox, and rightwing Mormons who think I'm the devil because I'm so obviously heretical. As long as the hatred is evenly balanced on both sides, I'm probably OK. As for the official Church, the reaction is that despite the distaste some Church leaders have had for some of my works, they have found me loyal enough and orthodox enough in my life and actions to engage me to write major projects for the Church: The Hill Cumorah Pageant presented every year near Palmyra, NY, and the musical play "Barefoot to Zion" (with my brother Arlen as composer) honoring the Mormon pioneers on the 150th anniversary of their entry into the Salt Lake Valley. Oddly, even those Mormons who love my work often assume that in order to be a successful writer, I must somehow be "not a good Mormon." I get letters telling me how much the person loved my novel Saints or some other work with a Mormon bent, and then asking at the end, "When did you leave the Church?" or "Have you ever been a Mormon?" It seems to be a stereotype today that all writers must be iconoclastic and cynical. And yet there is no activity more dependent on a sense of allegiance to a community than the act of writing fiction. In truth, I am iconoclastic and skeptical (not cynical) -- but skepticism, if it's honest, also doubts its own doubts; too many would-be skeptics in fact embrace their questions as if they were answers. I continue to know that my questions are questions, and even my answers are only approximations to truth; I remain perpetually ready to adapt to genuine evidence when it presents itself. In the meantime, though, I find that my Mormon faith coincides with reality far more accurately than any other belief system I have found, and the Mormon community is the one to which I have the most allegiance and whose purposes I am most committed to advancing. The more deeply I explore Mormon thought and Mormon life, the more truth and virtue I find within both.

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I don't feel prolific. I'm keenly aware that if I could ever find the discipline to work steadily, I could write six books a year. My total of less than two a year tells you exactly how unsteadily I work (sighs). As for writer's block, I regard it as my unconscious mind telling me that I'm making a gross mistake in the project I'm working on. It's not a problem, it's a blessing, and the mystery is to find out the mistake, toss out the ineffective section, and write a new version that works. This sometimes means throwing away as much as a hundred pages -- sometimes more -- but I have never found "writer's block" to be wrong. Whenever I'm stopped on a project, it's because I was doing something false or weak, and when I get it right, it becomes more powerful and true.

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Working with my brilliantly talented brother, Arlen, who wrote Broadway-worthy music that made my lyrics sound better than they are.

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I listen to music constantly, of many kinds, by many artists. I sing whenever people will listen, I conduct a choir from time to time, I love directing amateur musicals because I can help people learn how to sing for performance. I wish we still had the tradition in American culture that my parents had when they were growing up -- of singing as a part of regular social life. Of parties that include singing around the piano. Of piano lessons as necessary to become presentable in society. Today, the proliferation of recorded music has largely killed social music because nobody can compete with a CD with full production values. For most Americans, there's professional music or nothing. Too bad.

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Watching student writers "get it" and seeing the change in their work as they acquire the tools that let them tell their own stories far more effectively -- or to find truer, more important stories to tell.

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First person, because it feels easier and they're too inexperienced to realize that first person imposes far more limitations and weaknesses to overcome.

Idea-story structure where it isn't appropriate, so that the revelation of the idea is always set up as the climax of the book, instead of the first sentence.

Trying for style when they should try for clarity and let style come naturally and unnoticed.

Trying for drama or comedy when they should try for truth first, pain second, and let the drama and comedy emerge from the responses of the characters to truth and to suffering.

Imitating writers they admire or trying to duplicate stories they've loved.

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Don't even think about writing sf or fantasy unless you've read every story in:

The Hugo Winners

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame

Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions.

These stories are the root of the field. If you don't know them, you will try to reinvent the wheel; and since the readers do know them, it will kill your work. Besides, you can't learn the tools of the trade without being familiar with how they've been used and developed. Science fiction is more demanding than literary fiction, and is harder to do well; the reward is that science fiction and fantasy allow you to tell any story that can be told in li-fi, and far more that can't.

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I already knew how to write a scene before I started. Good thing, because I had no clue how to write a story or novel, and my scene-writing carried my work and allowed me to get published and paid while learning how to do the rest of the job.

But the most important thing is the absolute impossibility of ignoring the audience when you write for theatre. Writers who are victimized by li-fi writing teachers often become downright hostile to the audience, making it needlessly difficult for them to care about or understand what they're reading. But even the most audience-unfriendly writers for theatre sink out of sight if they don't entertain the audience. What people forget about Beckett and Ionesco and Pinter and others who seemingly broke "all" the rules is that Waiting for Godot and Rhinoceros and The Birthday Party (if I remember the titles right) are all marvelously entertaining every moment. The writer was aware of the need to engage the audience and keep them engaged, for if they don't, the play closes. Whereas far too many writers of li-fi act as if the reader had a duty to finish the book regardless of how much confusion and boredom and showing-off the writer forces upon them. Nobody buys their books, either -- but they are able to tell each other, and mostly believe it, that the people don't buy their books (or read their poems!) because the audience is a bunch of uneducated idiots. In theatre, you know that it is never the fault of the audience if they hate the show.

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It gives me the illusion of accomplishing something important, but by saving constantly I can undo all my mistakes. This works much better than real life, where most of what I do is not important at all, and my mistakes always bite me.

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Serious studies have shown that for those who are violence prone, depictions of violence can raise their level of likelihood to act violently. This is hardly a surprise -- if our entertainment media did not cause us to be more likely to act in imitation of or admiration for what we see, advertising would not work and so those arts would not pay (grins). However, common sense also tells us that the violence-prone managed to do plenty of mayhem before television or radio or movies or computer games existed. That's because all these are is storytelling media, and before these media existed, we still had stories. Check out Jack and the Beanstalk and the grisly events in Homer. We have stories about hunger, love, and death because that's what we care about in our lives.

So the problem isn't that we have these new media which give us stories we've never had before. The problem is that the new media give them to us with a level of realism that we've never had before, and the filmwrights and gamewrights are so lacking in taste, proportion, and social conscience that they treat both violence and sexuality with a prurient fascination that has long since passed the boundaries of wackoland. Is there anyone in the audience who needs yet another graphic depiction of sex or violence? Is there anyone who ever needed it? You can have the threat of violence and the promise of sex without ever showing them -- and they're almost always far more effective presented that way than they ever are when graphically displayed. It's bad art, and it has a bad effect on those who are most vulnerable to it. But unfortunately, most of these arts are practiced by people who have not grown out of the adolescent stage of wanting to shock people in order to seem cool -- even though, like adolescents, they can't think of a single new way to shock anybody, so nobody is actually shocked at all, they're just embarrassed or bored ... or, if they're marginal personalities, excited in a sick way.

There is a myth that "expressing" or "fulfilling" an emotion makes it go away, as if humans were balloons that need to vent these gases or explode. But the opposite is true, and we've known it all along, despite the bogus "experts" who told us repression was bad for us. If you act out your anger, you get angrier. If you act on your lusts, it takes even more to stimulate them next time. The more violence and sex we get from our entertainment, the angrier and more violent and more perverse and more sex-obsessed we become. Repression caused us no discernable harm beyond temporary frustration -- and as any good lover knows, temporary frustration is the essence of the art of satisfaction. But massive "expression" of the "truth" of violence and sex has caused us great harm.

Of course, the boundaries of taste are drawn in different places for different people. Things that offend me might not offend you, or vice versa. That's why the idea of government meddling in censorship is so bad -- from the first moment, the censors always go straight for things whose "evil" is visible only to them, while ignoring the things that are truly awful. The trouble is that when there is no self-restraint, governments eventually get involved. If smokers, for instance, had merely been courteous and kind to others, there would be no anti-smoking laws. It was the shameless rudeness of smokers that led to them being fenced around with law, and I have no pity for them. Likewise, if we get government censorship it will be wholly because of the irresponsibility of storytellers who cared not a whit for the effect their work might have on the community they live in. They have fouled the nest; if they don't clean it up themselves, they probably aren't going to like it when somebody else cleans it up for them. I hate censorship; but I hate having to raise my children in the culture these irresponsible people have created and are creating for us. When the balance tips, it will tip hard and far, and I personally resent the all-or-nothing crew who, by adamantly rejecting all self-restraint and celebrating the most vile stuff as "edgy" and admirable, will someday provoke the puritan backlash that will clean my slate along with theirs. They'll whine about the censors, but I'll know that it was their own excesses that led society to prefer the censors to them.

The only consolation is that the public can only stand censorship for a little while. Within a generation, the theaters reopened in England; the people of Iran are already wishing for more freedom. But wouldn't it be better to use good taste and a sense of decency and public responsibility to keep the censorship from ever seeming necessary?

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I just finished the draft of the screenplay that finally works. Previously we tried to find strategies to childproof the script -- to deculkinize it, if I may coin a phrase. But since then we've had contact with a young actor who can actually carry the emotional weight of a film like this, and so I could write a script that put the emotional center back on the character of Ender Wiggin where it belongs. Now the script, even at 136 pages, stands up and sings. Besides, if Ender's Shadow is a bestseller, Hollywood will take it seriously, since money is the trump card in every trick.

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The same challenge you always face finding a movie in a book. Movies are 120 pages long, as a rule. Novels are many times that length. Some novels, like those of Grisham, seem to lose little in the transition, but if you're already spare in your writing, a 600-page novel will have no extraneous scenes or storylines that can be cut. That's why Grisham's novels work abridged as books on tape, while mine don't. I simply don't include things that can be cut in the first place. (This is not a virtue, it's just a way of approaching the question of what to leave in and what to leave out. And my way is damnably inconvenient when you must abridge.) So the biggest challenge was simply finding the part of the story that expressed the whole. I think I tried versions with every scene in and every scene out. Characters added and characters combined and characters dropped. And for this task, the novelist is the least-suited for the task, since he already decided that everything in the book was worth including; if he thought it could be cut, it wouldn't be in the book in the first place (grins). I can adapt someone else's work far more easily than my own.

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It's not a balancing act. It's a process of falling off the tightrope repeatedly, now on one side, now on the other. I'm going to miss the whole month of September with my family because I'll be touring for Ender's Shadow. That stinks. But then, sometimes I hang around the house and do fun stuff so much that I don't get the work done, and that doesn't have very happy results either. It's the dilemma that every working parent faces: Do we need the money more than we need me to spend time with the kids? By and large, writing as a career has allowed me far more time with my family than I would ever have had with a nine-to-five job.

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It is impossible to write fiction of any kind that does not make powerful moral statements. But in science fiction, you can transform the "reality" of the story so as to clarify the issues, allowing the moral dilemma to be brought into sharper relief.

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A novel about Sarah, the wife of Abraham, for the LDS audience; the screenplays of Feed the Baby of Love and Dogwalker and Pastwatch; several TV series projects, including Border Town, whose pilot we just filmed on spec in Mexico; the next Alvin Maker book; selling the Ender's Game movie to a director and a studio; a musical film version of my story Pageant Wagon. Lots of balls in the air. Some of it's bound to get done, someday, though I've noticed that by and large none of these things happen till I actually get to work on them.