The Gate Thief
Page 36
Having invented the world I needed, I then had to find a way to make it clear to readers. What made it especially difficult was my determination that all the communication between ka and ba had to be on a pre- or sub-verbal level. We don’t talk to our own minds and bodies in language, and so when I had Wad-Loki’s ba trying to share his memories with Danny North’s ka, I had to put it on a nonverbal level. Yet books are written in words. Finding a means of representing non-speech in speech was daunting. I hope that for most readers, I succeeded.
As I learned more about manmages, the character of Anonoei began to grow. I began this novel with no idea that Anonoei would be important in it; she insisted on growing into something important, she and her sons, and so they will be major figures in the third and final volume.
Another problem was to keep from getting so caught up in the lore of magery that I lost track of the real world—our world, and Danny’s place in it. It was very important to me that his friends become memorable individuals, and that Danny fall in love in a serious way. These high school students should not be merely Danny’s foils, people he can talk to in order for us to learn what he is thinking. In this novel, they represent us, the drowthers, ordinary people who are in awe of the gods, if we believe in them; and I have met few people who didn’t have some conception of a god, whether they would apply that title to it or not. How would these teenagers respond to having the new kid turn out to be the equivalent of Hermes and Mercury and Loki and Thoth?
One theme that runs through mythology is the amazing fecundity of the gods—the world seems half-populated by their bastards. While a few of these are rapes (in the old sense of “carrying off” the human female, whether the sex turned out to be consensual or not), it’s also a fact of human life that there are certain women who are irresistibly drawn to powerful males. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. This is not true for all women, or for all powerful people. But Danny North would not have to look like a young George Clooney or Robert Redford in order to attract the notice—let alone the eager desire—of a certain contingent of young women. His power, his intelligence, and, I must add, his innate goodness would make him desirable to many girls, for reasons as various as the girls themselves.
The result was that my original outline for this book is now an amusing cast-off; that which survives from it will be in the third volume, while most of what’s valuable in this book was not in the outline. Stories are invented as you go along, if you’re writing them properly, and that means that characters and situations that come out of nowhere can blossom into productive mines that bring out tramloads of metal-rich ore. My skill as a refiner is a different issue. But I think the ore I smelted to make this book is of a much finer metal than what I originally planned.
How can we tell, though? The earlier version was never written, not a word of it. It existed in my head, so I think of it as real; but no graduate student will ever pore over the differences between drafts, because the book you just read is the only draft that actually hit the paper.
How do you unfold the tale in an order which will be clear and interesting to readers who obviously begin the book knowing almost nothing about the story, and must end it understanding all? I regard it as the essence of good structure that all the key information will have been presented earlier in the book, so when you move through the climactic scenes at the end, everything is already clear to the reader, because it was so well explained earlier on. This means that the exposition is front-loaded. But readers won’t tolerate (nor should they) a story that begins with nothing but exposition.
The device that works best is for the point-of-view character to know little more than the reader does. Thus when the viewpoint character learns it, so does the reader.
But what if the viewpoint character’s learning is also vague and highly subjective? And how much information is too much for a given scene? Boredom and inclarity are the ways to drive readers out of a book, to make them close it and never open it again. The goal, then, is to provide the light with enough sweetness at every stage that the reader will stay with you, learning constantly but also getting the rewards of a good story along the way. This is not a trick—here are the good bits, so you’ll keep reading the boring bits. On the contrary, the good bits require the explanations, but the explanations themselves need to be part of the action, so that it never feels as if the story has stopped cold while the reader is brought up to speed. This is such a delicate dance that most writers fail at it most of the time. And most of us realize that we will never find the perfect way to tell a story; it’s likely that there is no such thing. We just keep dancing as fast as we can, hoping to take you far enough into the workings of the world that, when you move from one event to the next in the story, you always know where you are and what’s happening, and you always understand just what is at stake.
This is hard enough with fiction that takes place in the “real” world; when the world itself must also be explained, the expository burden becomes dreadfully heavy. The result is that some writers skimp on world development, coasting along by borrowing the stereotypes of earlier writers in the field. Others include every detail of their world creation, whether it’s relevant to the plot or not, as if they wanted to make all their readers memorize The Silmarillion before they were worthy to read The Lord of the Rings.
This is a long way of saying that the better your world creation, the heavier the expository burden. And sometimes your world creation is so deep and rich that the actual story never measures up to it.
In the effort to create a story that does measure up, sometimes you’re late; but that does not imply that being late will make your story better. My most popular book was written in a single swath, more quickly than I could have imagined possible. This does not imply that moving quickly through a tale will make it better, either. Each story poses its own unique set of problems. It merely happens that the problems I had to solve in order to tell this story were some of the hardest, creatively and technically, that I’ve ever faced in my writing career.
That’s the problem with growing older and more experienced. Decisions that would have been “good enough” when I was thirty now seem like cheap shortcuts to me at sixty-one. I know how to write better than I did before; but knowing better usually means that I have to work harder, invent more, and find solutions to ever-more-difficult expository problems. This is why writers never retire. If we’re doing our job right, we’re always just figuring out how this thing is done; we’re always novice writers flailing about to find some kind of solid ground for moving forward.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Orson Scott Card lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, and their youngest child, Zina Margaret.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE GATE THIEF
Copyright © 2013 by Orson Scott Card
All rights reserved.
Portions of The Gate Thief appeared in Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issues 30 and 31, as the short story “Flying Children.”
Cover art by Trevillion Images
A Tor Book
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ISBN 978-0-7653-2658-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781429947039 (e-book)
First Edition: March 2013
Tor Books by Orson Scott Card
Note: Within series, books are best read in listed order.
—–
ENDER UNIVERSE
Ender Series
Ender Wiggin: The finest general the world could hope to find or breed.
Ender's Game
Ender in Exile
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
Ender's Shadow Series
Parallel storylines to Ender's Game from Bean: Ender's right hand, his strategist, and his friend.
Ender's Shadow
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
Shadow of the Giant
Shadows in Flight
The First Formic War Series
One hundred years before Ender's Game, the aliens arrived on Earth with fire and death.
These are the stories of the First Formic War.
Earth Unaware
Earth Afire
Ender novellas
A War of Gifts
First Meetings
The Authorized Ender Companion by Jake Black
A complete and in-depth encyclopedia of all the persons, places, things, and events in Orson Scott Card's Ender Universe.
THE MITHER MAGES SERIES
Danny North is different from his magical family. And when he discovers his gift, it is greater than he ever imagined—which could earn him a death sentence.
The Lost Gate
The Gate Thief
THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER SERIES
Visit the magical America that might have been, marvel as the tale of Alvin Maker unfolds.
Seventh Son
Red Prophet
Prentice Alvin
Alvin Journeyman
Heartfire
The Crystal City
HOMECOMING SERIES
Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. But it is still vital.
The Memory of Earth
The Call of Earth
The Ships of Earth
Earthfall
Earthborn
WOMEN OF GENESIS SERIES
Fiction exploring the human side of Biblical women.
Sarah
Rebekah
Rachel & Leah
THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD
Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.
Keeper of Dreams
The Changed Man
Cruel Miracles
Flux
Monkey Sonatas
STAND-ALONE FICTION
Hart's Hope: Dark and powerful fantasy.
Lovelock (with Kathryn Kidd): A startling look at the ethics of bioengineering.
Pastwatch: In this novel of time travel, can the past be changed?
Saints: A novel of the early days of the Mormon Church.
Songmaster: An SF classic and a haunting story of power and love.
The Worthing Saga: The tale of a seed ship sent out to save the human race.
Wyrms: The story of a young woman's journey to confront her destiny, and her world's.
The Folk of the Fringe: When America is destroyed, it's up to those on the fringes to rebuild.
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