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

OSC Answers
The real question here is: Am I aware of particular childhood events that shaped my writing? And even within this question, there are several ways of interpreting what you mean by "writing."

A. Childhood events could have shaped the subject matter or content of my writing.

This is the area most likely to be unconscious. I had a reasonably happy childhood, but because misery and fear expand to fit the available events, I naturally had about as much angst as I was going to have anyway, only about more trivial events. I was a "smart kid" (i.e., compliant with authority and capable of working ahead of grade level') who got along great with adults but had a harder time fitting in with kids my age. As athletics became more and more important, I became less and less involved with other boys. I found that most of my close friends were girls, because girls valued talking and were more aware of the culture and did not judge me by my athletic ability. I also had a few close male friends with whom I could talk about anything. Those feelings of not fitting in, that sense of myself as being an intellectual rather than physically active, and that closeness to girls and participation in the society of girls explains much about the subjects I write about and the types of people I understand best.

B. Childhood events could have shaped the manner in which I write, the style or genre.

I have very verbal parents, both gifted teachers; in addition, my father was talented in visual arts and my mother in music and drama. I grew up surrounded by arts of all kind, and above all I lived in a family where excellent grammar was used with a high level of vocabulary. We were all aware of the subtleties of language and we delighted in them, enjoying each other's wit and forming a community of raconteurs that I have rarely found matched outside my own family (one of the rare matches being my wife's family <grin>).

Also, growing up Mormon gave me a natural affinity for science fiction, the one genre in which the Practical Man is the most common hero and great ideas, both practical and cosmic, can be addressed. Also, Mormon children are highly educated in scriptural stories and the language of scripture, so that the music of the King James version and the voice of Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon and other Mormon writings were a regular part of my language experience. The result was that I often resort to an incantatory voice that echoes elements of scripture.

C. Childhood events could have helped determine whether or not I chose to become a writer and whether, having chosen, I had a chance to succeed.

Yet at the same time, I loved rough and ready exploration in the creeks and woods and orchards near my home in California and wandering through the Arizona desert when my family lived there. I actually enjoyed physical activity, I was simply too lousy at it to make it fun to play sports with other boys -- but solitary things like hiking, climbing, even shooting baskets, those I enjoyed. And I learned that the most important ideas in my life I couldn't talk about with anyone, because nobody would get it and those few who almost got it didn't care. Though I could get as lonely as anyone, I was profoundly introverted and loved my solitary time -- especially my reading time. And yet I was also a born performer and loved to speak or sing or (later) act for audiences. Give me an audience of ten thousand and I'll be fine; set me down at a dinner with two strangers and I'll be in hell. It is my love of solitude and my devotion to reading that led me toward a career as a writer. You have to have absorbed a lot of language for the music of it to be part of your soul, and in order to have all the tools you need.

In addition, my parents -- especially my mom -- were pathological encouragers. They really made us kids believe we could do anything we really worked at. We were imbued with confidence and did not fear to try doing anything that looked interesting. And whatever we did, they were there, rooting for us, or in the background, helping us succeed. I saw my dad be resourceful in any kind of craft, able to design anything we needed. Both my parents were people who made things happen -- I saw how they organized to accomplish tasks and enlisted the support of others in their projects.

OSC Answers
I don't try. When telling a story, a person's innate beliefs will be revealed unconsciously, without effort or thought. In fact, it is only lying that can be done deliberately, and even when trying to tell the truth, if you control the story in order to make a point or express a belief, you will end up lying because your effort to control will suppress the natural expression of your unconscious beliefs. In short, when you deliberately try to express your beliefs in your fiction, you end up expressing only what you believe that you believe, not what you actually believe without even realizing that it is possible to believe otherwise.

So I concentrate on telling a story that feels right and true to me, using whatever tidbits of information or invention feel interesting at the time, and trust that my core beliefs will be revealed without my being aware of them.

OSC Answers
Beyond the childhood influences mentioned above, my family does influence my writing in two ways. First, my wife is my first reader on everything, and her responses of doubt, confusion, or distraction are my best guide to whether I'm actually telling to an audience the story that I wish to tell in a manner that will be effective.

Second, the knowledge that my wife and children will be reading what I write makes it impossible for me to write something I would be ashamed to have them read, both in matters of decorum and in matters of truth and honor. I can't even attempt to write a cynical story designed just to make money, because I know I would deserve their contempt. Whether they would actually show me such disappointment I don't know -- I have never written in such a way as to deserve it.

OSC Answers
Stories are always about causality -- that's what makes them stories instead of catalogues and lists. Why do things happen as they do? Why do people do the things they do, say the things they say?

So storytelling is always an assertion about reality -- specifically, about the causal connections between events across time.

But storytelling is also about value, for a reason just as innate and unavoidable: To tell a story is to declare that these events are worth telling. Especially when the story is made up, the writer is making the assertion that you will find what happens in the tale interesting. That is an assertion of value -- of what matters enough to spend time reading about it (or watching it on stage or screen).

Combine those two elements, and you're talking about truth (reality) and worth (value) -- why people do things, and which things are worth doing. It is as impossible to tell stories without making (usually unconscious) assertions about right and wrong as it is to speak aloud in a vacuum.

OSC Answers
My entire body of work constitutes my best attempt to answer that question. In those stories you will learn more about what I really believe than you will ever learn from asking me direct questions, for the questions will elicit only what I know, consciously, that I believe, while my work reveals my deepest beliefs, sometimes in ways that I have not yet detected myself.

Of course, everyone has the ethical system they believe in (i.e., they judge themselves and others according to this standard) and the ethical system they practice (i.e., when forced to decide, this is how they actually act -- even if they beat themselves up for it later because it's so different from what they believe is right). I suspect that my fiction is far more likely to reflect the morality I believe in than the morality I live, insofar as they are not the same. And yet ... I think maybe both moral systems are revealed, since when being truthful about characters, I will often have them act as I would actually act, rather than always acting as I would wish that I would act.

In any event, I am keenly aware that my most-admired heroes -- Ender, Alvin, a few others -- are much better people than I am. This makes me very uncomfortable when people assume that I am somehow the moral equivalent of characters they love and admire. I have neither their wisdom nor their goodness. But I care very much what goodness is, and so do my best characters, even when they don't measure up. Perhaps that is the mother of virtues: To know what honor is and value it, even when one cannot live up to it. Perhaps this is why I have been so deeply disturbed throughout the entire Clinton presidency, from his first emergence as a candidate until the present day: He is, if anything, the opposite of my virtuous characters, not because he's the most evil person in history (he's far from that) but because he seems so utterly devoid of knowledge of and interest in what honor is. The question doesn't exist for him. While for the characters I admire most, the question is the only one that matters, ultimately, and they judge their own actions by that standard, even when they don't always live by their concept of honor.