Part II: Ender, Orson Scott Card, Sound Writing Advice, and Strange Opinions

An author should be judged first by his writing, and a writing class first by the validity of its messages. In beginning my blog posts about OSC's writing class instead with a discussion of OSC's much-lambasted essay, I think that I may have distracted everyone from the major topic I wish to discuss. However, I feared that if I didn't address what would have been the proverbial elephant in the room, then all of my readers would be preoccupied with the elephant's proverbial stink, proverbial crowding, and proverbial occasional loud trumpeting. Regardless of the offense you (I expect) take from OSC's rather extreme viewpoint on homosexuality and marriage, Ender's Game remains an amazing work and I personally was able to separate out the advice meant for adoption at one's escritoire with his opinions on virtually everything else (a list that I will include at the end of this post to induce further incredulity).

Although I've been hinting at the degree to which I was enamored with OSC's writing suggestions, I would be remiss if I did not mention that roughly half the class probably walked away trying to decide if they were going to believe OSC, or the instructors from previous writing courses. If there was one of OSC's extreme opinions that I leaned towards agreement with, it was the idea that a fair number of lit courses are baloney. For OSC, large amounts of narcissism and aloofness pervade much of the literary world, especially in academia. While I personally am more indifferent to the endless discussion of literary merit and the depth of literary analysis that I fortunately managed to avoid during my undergraduate experience, I could help but nod when he said, "Most writing teachers begin their course by saying, 'I don't know anything about plot, so we're going to focus on style.' I am here to tell you that directly following this course, you should go home, tear up your copy of Strunk and White, and burn it. These writing teachers are not teaching you how to write. They are teaching you how to conform to a bland and insipid framework that, when putting pen to paper, should never be mistaken for style." Or something like that. The point was that these teachers completely fail to teach how to write by focusing so single-mindedly on style.

Since shock-and-awe was clearly OSC's preferred method for idea delivery, I doubt if pressed he'd assert that Elements of Style is completely devoid of helpful content, but I gladly absorbed his thoughts on developing a writing style. Not only did he underline the idea that style cannot be taught (but only learned by copious amounts of reading and even more practice actually writing), but that the main problem with a bad piece of writing almost never has to do with the writing itself (mechanics, vocabulary, strict avoidance of the passive voice). The main problem with "bad" writing is a bad story. The main problem with most writing is exactly what many writing teachers specifically avoid talking about. Without even bothering to dissect how a story functions, this makes intuitive sense. You can't write if you don't have any idea what you're writing about. As Dan Brown demonstrates, marginally good writing is perfectly excusable if you have an amazing story and tell it relatively well, which he absolutely does. Here, "telling it well" does not mean using big words and complicated imagery, but effectively and clearly presenting causal relationships. (No offense to Dan Brown intended, and I certainly do not consider myself a "good" writer yet.)   

Let me insert here that when I say problems with writing have more to do with the story than with the writing itself, I want to mention that we're assuming the writer has a functional understanding of the english language. We're not talking about misspellings, incorrect use of apostrophes, or egregious violations of basic sentence structure ... to a point. After all, used intentionally, the afore-mentioned tools could conceivably be integral to telling the story.

The over-arching theme was that everything, literally everything: style, metaphor, imagery, meaning, symbols, character arcs, EVERYTHING, comes from having a complete understanding of your own story. All of those things that lit classes sit and deconstruct semester after semester usually arise naturally, and many times without the author's conscious intention. OSC said it himself. He receives essays discussing meaning and symbolism/parallels in his own stories constantly that he did not mean to put there. I can't tell you the number of times I sat in a lit class and thought to myself "There is no way the author did that on purpose. You are totally projecting your own meaning and experiences over it." There's nothing wrong with doing that, by the way, that's how we digest a story. I just got annoyed every time a teacher claimed there was meaning in a story that wasn't actually there. Let's leave Heart of Darkness out of this, by the way. :-)

Of course, assessing a problem with a piece of writing by simply saying the story is "bad" is kind of like looking at a car that won't start and saying the engine's broken. It is an assessment that only begins to scratch the surface. In the interest of time, I am not going to go into every single element of creating a working story that we discussed, but if you're interested in them I'd be happy to share later. I will however sum up one major discussion thread:

OSC: "When you have writer's block, it's your unconscious mind telling you that you're writing crap. Do not force it. Your story has died. You must go back, get rid of 'bad decisions' [in the story]. The idea behind this quote is that in fiction (and actually I think in any piece of writing), but in fiction especially, the author must constantly be answering the following questions, as posed by the reader: Why (mechanical cause), why (motive cause), what result, and how? By successfully addressing all of these questions, the author guides the reader through the story, and convinces him or her that the story is "true". This was a deep discussion that lasted half a day, but the implications applied not only to my attempts at writing a sci fi novel, but also I realized to my writing at E Source. The problem with most of my reports was that I wasn't adequately telling the story of my research results. 

For me, this was an overwhelmingly liberating way of troubleshooting the writing process. Yes, my voice is immature and that immaturity weakens the pieces of my sci fi novel that I've written so far, but until now, I was assuming that my writing was flawed because of the writing itself. Yes, I need to work on being clear and concise, but I must stop assuming that something isn't working simply because I can't find a way to say it properly. Once I have a truly water-tight and compelling story, the writing will follow. Don't go back and try to fiddle with the writing to fix a part of the story that isn't working, go back and fix the story itself! Kind of sounds laughably obvious when phrased that way, but this isn't how many of us were 'taught' to write in school.

Looks like this post is going to be in three parts, since my laptop is nearly out of battery. But this just about sums up what I wanted to say about OSC's writing advice. I'd be happy to discuss more specifics if anyone is interested! The final post will be shorter, and will list some of the more ridiculous OSC quotes, as well as the myriad of pop culture icons he hates. I also want to explore a bit of the inconsistency between the themes of tolerance and understanding in his Ender books, and his strange lack of either for an astonishing number of things in society.