.png)
The Rotary Spark Podcast
Welcome to our dedicated podcast for Rotary International's District 5750, designed to connect our community through the power of personal storytelling. Each episode celebrates the unique journeys of our fellow Rotarians and community members, highlighting their individual experiences, motivations, and the profound impact of their service and contributions.
Join us as we dive into heartfelt discussions with individuals from all walks of life, sharing stories that inspire and foster connection.
The Rotary Spark Podcast
#0030 - Orson Scott Card
Step into the creative mind of Orson Scott Card, the visionary behind one of science fiction's most influential novels, as he shares the rarely-told story of his journey from creek-exploring child to celebrated author.
Card reveals how his remarkably free-range childhood in 1950s California—riding bicycles across busy highways at age eight and exploring dry creek beds for hours—laid the foundation for his creative independence. With disarming candor, he discusses the family environment where writing wasn't considered special, just expected, and how his early comfort with public speaking contrasts sharply with his lifelong struggle with small talk.
The conversation takes fascinating turns as Card unpacks the evolution of Ender's Game from award-winning short story to beloved novel to disappointing film adaptation. His insider's perspective on Hollywood provides eye-opening revelations, including how Harrison Ford secretly functioned as an uncredited co-director on the Ender's Game film, demonstrating acting techniques that transformed scenes through subtle physical choices.
Card's analysis of adaptation challenges offers profound insights for storytellers across all media. Through thoughtful examination of works like Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice, he illustrates why some adaptations soar while others falter, making a compelling case for the miniseries format as the ideal future for Ender's Game on screen.
Perhaps most valuable are Card's hard-earned lessons for creative professionals. His wisdom cuts through conventional advice with refreshing directness: "Remember you're a human first and an artist second." He dismisses formulaic approaches to storytelling, emphasizing instead that "story is everything" and that excellence, not trend-following, leads to success.
Whether you're a longtime fan of Card's work, an aspiring creator, or simply fascinated by the creative process, this conversation offers invaluable perspective on storytelling, adaptation, and maintaining humanity in creative pursuits. Listen now and discover why Card believes the most important question for any storyteller isn't about technique, but about belief: "If you're not all special, why are you writing?"
This episode of the Rotary Spark Podcast is brought to you by Triger Media — helping individuals and businesses build a solid digital presence. From website design to social media management and podcast production, they provide the tools and support to share your story effectively. Triger Media works closely with clients to create something that feels true to their brand. Give them a call at 978-290-8200 to see how they can help.
http://trigermediaokc.com/
Triger MediaWeb Design, Social Media & Podcast Services.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Welcome to the Rotary Spark podcast. Today, my guest is Orson Scott Card. Thank you for joining us, mr Card. How are you doing today?
Orson Scott Card:I'm doing just fine. One of the joys of being an old man that sleep is a precious thing that I hardly ever get, and I actually got a little bit last night, so I may actually even be coherent in our conversation today well.
Brian Triger:I'm glad that you got some rest, so I'm very excited. I got exposed to your literature when I was younger and I've read several books throughout the years, so I really appreciate this opportunity to ask you some questions. I'd like to start out and maybe get into your shoes a little bit, by finding out or asking you this question what was your childhood like?
Orson Scott Card:Well, I was just thinking about that because of course there are ups and downs in everybody's childhood and I've rather dwelt on some of the negatives recently, but I finally realized that I actually had kind of an idyllic childhood I was thinking about. I grew up in Santa Clara, california, and the hours that I spent exploring the dry creek beds the one behind our house and the other one between my house and the elementary school I attended. I actually had a lot of time, both alone and with friends at different times, just climbing around in the creek beds and it was, you know, as close to nature as I was going to be able to come in that suburban environment. But my parents were astonishingly open minded about letting me go out and have a childhood and be free. I remember at the age of eight running running errands to the Lucky Supermarket on El Camino riding my bicycle, and I'm glad that they trusted me. I never shortchanged them. But it also was something kind of astonishing compared to the way things are now. Who sends their eight-year-old kid on a bike to cross one of the busiest highways in the state in order to do some grocery shopping and bring it back in the basket on his bicycle. As an eight-year-old I was responsible, but there were no bike helmets then and my bike didn't have any lights helmets then and my bike didn't have any lights, didn't have a horn for even beeping at anybody. So that, and then just being able to do what I wanted and go where I wanted, even at that young age.
Orson Scott Card:And then when we moved to Arizona, when I was how old was I? 14, 13, I once again got on my bicycle and only this time I had friends on bikes who would go with me and we would be all over the Mesa area on our bicycles, ranging from desert to orchard to alfalfa fields and, of course, the town itself, and we really had an amazing amount of freedom. Maybe that's part of the reason why I never minded the fact that I didn't get a driver's license at 16. Didn't get a driver's license. So I was 23, or nearly 23, just a few weeks shy of that, and I didn't feel hampered by it very much at all, not that I mean, obviously I didn't do any dating. You can't go dating on a bike Usually. Uh, it would take a very special kind of female person to want to date a guy who couldn't drive and who was on a bicycle, but uh, I had a good, I had a good childhood. Uh, no complaints a good.
Brian Triger:I had a good childhood. Uh, no complaints. Did you? Did you start writing when you were younger? Were there any moments like during your childhood or early adolescence that really shaped a path tied to uh writing, uh writing, cycling and any other passionate activities that you had throughout the rest of your life?
Orson Scott Card:Well, there were very few activities that I was serious about except reading. Okay, I would write, but that's because everybody in our family took it for granted that we could write. It wasn't like a competition with the rest of the world. We didn't think we were the best, but we just when stuff needed writing. We didn't think to delegate it, we just wrote it, and my parents were that way.
Orson Scott Card:I grew up knowing that my mom had written a play that had song lyrics in it. I think it was my grandmother who told the original story. My mom was involved in producing it and one of my uncles had written a score to it. So this musical comedy that they wrote was, I mean, it got talked about often enough. But I knew that I was from a family where we wrote stuff and performed it. We were performers above all.
Orson Scott Card:My dad was an absolutely masterful speaker at church, which is where we got most of our experience. That way. I had fun doing it and I was able to hold an audience. And I got that feel by the time I was eight or nine years old, that sense of being at a pulpit or on a dais and speaking and having the rapt attention of an audience. So I've been reading audiences since I was kind of young and if there was anything that I thought would be in my future, I was pretty sure I'd end up speaking to people, and so I've enjoyed that. I always have. I can't remember ever having a moment's stage fright about speaking in front of an audience. Of course, I have to say I do remember one time when I had terrifying, soul-numbing stage fright, but it was not about performing.
Orson Scott Card:The first time I went to a Science Fiction Writers of America function, it was the Nebula Awards Banquet, the year that my story Ender's Game was nominated for a Hugo different award. I was not nominated for a Nebula, but I was going to the Nebula Awards banquet because my editor, ben Bova, told me that it would be really good if I came. So I did. It was in Berkeley, california, and as I was walking out of my hotel room to take the elevator down to where the banquet was going to be held, I couldn't do it. I got to the elevator, turned around and went back to my room, and I did that several times because I had never been a science fiction writer in a public setting, been a science fiction writer in a public setting and I was sure that everybody would regard me as the Rube that I was. I was from Salt Lake City.
Orson Scott Card:The only clothing that I knew how to wear at a formal event was my Sunday go-to-meeting suit, and I somehow felt that that was probably all wrong for where I was going and I was correct. Everything that I feared I was correct about. And the problem is, I mean, the good thing was that none of it mattered. I had thought it mattered and then I realized that it didn't, because there was this epiphany that finally got me into that elevator and down, which was I'm on the Hugo ballot. For Pete's sake, I'm a writer. Whatever I do is correct. I mean, I will be writing like a professional writer because I'm a professional writer, and so if I go down there and I don't know all of the right social mores, it doesn't matter, because whatever I do will be the way this writer behaves. And that sort of arrogant self-realization gave me the courage to go ahead and go on downstairs. Nobody at my table had ever heard of my work or me, and that was fine. It meant that nobody was quizzing me about anything, uh, and there was some enjoyable conversation, but mostly it was the.
Orson Scott Card:It was the year that, uh, harlan elson won uh nebula for jeff d is five, a wonderful short story, and uh, so I got to see some people that had really mattered to me as a young writer, who were there present at the ceremonies. I didn't meet them because I'm not a glad hander I don't walk up to people and say hi, I'm Scott Gard, and because, for one thing, usually I would assume that they would go, so what? And so there's no reason to set myself up for public humiliation as far as I can see. But I just. I mean, I once shared an elevator with Gene Wolfe, one of the writers I admired most on earth, and I didn't say a word to him, just him and me in the elevator, and I just sat there watching the numbers change on the floors. And later we did meet and he took part in a writing workshop session that I was doing at a Worldcon. But I realized I had nothing to say to him except for just saying I really like your work, sir. And then, beyond that, where does the conversation go? We're going to find that out, I think, during this half hour. But I had no conversation, I had no small talk. I still don't.
Orson Scott Card:I have a terrible time just chatting because that's beyond my skills, beyond my confidence. Uh, skills beyond my confidence? Um, it's one of the reasons why I learned early on in my marriage that, generally speaking, I had always had a history of being much of having many more good friendships with girls than with boys. In school I had a couple of very, very close guy friends, uh, but other than that, they're all my close friends. All the people I hung out with were girls, girls who never, ever thought of me as having any romantic potential, which was okay. I didn't really think of myself as having any romantic potential potential, but, but, uh, I, I had this very clear awareness of the fact that if there's a subject matter, I can talk forever. If there's no subject matter, I have nothing to say. Well, right now, we, the subject matter is me, and so, uh, I obviously have a lot to say because I know that subject matter quite well, better than anybody else, I would imagine. But just chatting not something, I'm good at Interesting.
Brian Triger:I mean you've shared so much. So, just from the outside perspective, knowing that or finding that out about you is an interesting tidbit tidbit.
Orson Scott Card:Well it's, it's one. It's one of those weird things where, uh, I would have I never have nightmares about being on stage not knowing my lines, because I don't actually worry about that. Uh, of course, if it's in a play that I would need to know my lines, and I used to be able to memorize very well. Uh, though, I did have one time ever where I went up on a line and I have not performed in any place since then because I don't trust my memory anymore. But the nightmare of standing there on a stage with no subject matter just doesn't bother me, because it's happened to me now multiple times and I, you know, not even always a huge audience, sometimes several thousand people, but sometimes just a meeting room with 10 people. But I have no problem with taking over a meeting that isn't mine. You grow up as a Mormon kid by the time you're 18 or 19, you know how to stand up and start a meeting to make things get going, even if you have no authority whatsoever, and that's what I've done more than once.
Orson Scott Card:Remember, one time I went to a science fiction convention in Biloxi, Mississippi, and the folks who were organizing it really had never done it before.
Orson Scott Card:It was their first con and they had no programming and so when I arrived, I think that they just had this vague idea that programming just happens. So the other pros who were there with me, we sat down with one of the guys from the convention and we decided on the programming for the day, organized it and set it up and basically this is one of the very first conventions I ever went to, but it was my convention. I programmed it. Obviously, therefore, I was interested in all the panel topics and it was kind of fun. But it just comes naturally now to be able to get a meeting started or to just stand up at a microphone or without the microphone and talk and be ridiculous usually, but ridiculous gets laughs and audience engagement, so I don't mind. And talk and be ridiculous usually, but ridiculous gets laughs and audience engagement, so I don't mind being ridiculous. I think that's maybe the key to avoiding stage fright is if you don't mind being ridiculous.
Brian Triger:That's a really good point.
Brian Triger:I use that as much as I remember to, and one of the questions that comes to mind that I'd like to push your way what, or how, did life change? If I'm not mistaken, ender's Game was published in 85. The book was yes, so, and I I did my best before the sitting down in this interview to not research you too much, just based on my own excitement. Do my best to you know, take you off the pedestal that I had you on, which was what was and is challenging, aside from that internal thought process being exposed. Um, I, I remember being exposed to some information about you talking about advances and the challenges of just being a writer and stuff like that. So, out of curiosity, how did life change before and after Ender's Game? Like the publishing and the success of Ender's Game, did life dramatically transform in a reasonable amount of time, I guess is what I'm trying to say you know the actual date of publication of Ender's Game.
Orson Scott Card:At the moment of publication, nothing changes. Okay, because it takes time for things to catch on. It took time for Ender's Game to be nominated for awards and to receive them, and even then, even after having won the Hugo and the Nebula for Ender's Game, it's not that that instantly sparked bestseller status. Ender's Game never reached a bestseller list. During its initial publication. Money wasn't just flooding in, and so I knew that I had a book that was being noticed in the field of science fiction, but that isn't a reason to quit your day job. By the time Ender's Game came out as a novel, I was living solely from my writing income, so my earlier books had done well enough, not that I was living off of royalties, but that I could kind of count on getting advances above the normal minimum. When I started, the normal advance for somebody's early novels was $3,000. I had occasion to index to create the index for a biography by a fellow named Porges P-O-R-G-E-S of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edgar Rice Burroughs when he first sold books. The normal advance for a first-time writer was $3,000. The difference being that for $3,000 as your annual income in New York City at the time that Burroughs was starting. That would be enough money for you to pay rent on a very nice apartment and keep a couple of servants and a carriage, and that could be your entire income for the year and you'd be fine Nowadays. By the time I sold my first novel in, I think, 78, $3,000 was really not much more than a month and a half's income. Now it's less than that, but um it. The numbers never changed because writers kept accepting it, um, and certainly I did. I was pleased to get any payment at all. It was better than the short stories, uh, that I had sold. But I had already made the huge threshold decision of leaving my day job and we'd been doing fine. I never had a year in which I made less money than I had been making at the very poorly paying editorial jobs that I had had before that. So from sort of the skid row of the publishing industry, which is being an editor and a proofreader, I had made it into the lofty ranks of grossly underpaid, starving writers.
Orson Scott Card:I had a wife then and a child very quickly and they expected to be able to eat and so, uh and, and my wife, uh, worked. My wife worked at first. Um, uh, I've hated that I'm getting incoming calls here but I'm ignoring them. Um, uh, anyway, my wife worked at first, but then, when she got pregnant with our first child, um, but then when she got pregnant with our first child, she got such terrible morning sickness that she could not go up the elevators at her place of employment. She worked on the 21st floor of a building and then the express elevator just made her throw up. This is not a nice thing to have. Happen to you as you're trying to go to a place of employment is to know that every time you go to work, somebody's going to have to clean up the elevator. So, anyway, she stayed home and tried not to die of dehydration, and that was when I decided to quit my day job. Uh, which was weird. It was terrifying for her to think that she had married this guy who had a job and now I wasn't going to have a job.
Orson Scott Card:But uh, my, this big transformation came not on the strength of my fiction writing, but on the strength of my writing for a company called Living Scriptures in Ogden, utah. I was writing half-hour audio plays for them, which they would sell then in sets of I can't remember how many tapes there were to a set cassette tapes and I was involved in the recording of them as well, not in charge, but I was there as they were recording them and would do rewrites as needed, because sometimes I realized my writing wasn't as clear as I had intended. But I was living off of $125 script for these half-hour plays and so I was actually making a living from from what I had learned as a playwright. And I still, uh, my favorite, uh recording, my favorite dramatization of ender's game is not the movie, which laughably has that title and almost nothing else, but instead it's Ender's Game Alive, which is a production that we did. That is available at audiblecom and that's what I think of as a good adaptation of Ender's Game for a dramatic presentation. But that was my skill then was writing dialogue, was writing for audio, and it still is one of my favorite things to write.
Orson Scott Card:And when I'm writing my novels I write them with the audiobook in mind, because to me that's the real presentation. When you put out a book for other people to read silently to themselves, then they are the audiobook narrator, only they're not necessarily particularly good at it. I try to provide as many guidelines as I can, where the stresses are in a sentence, for example. The stresses are in a sentence, for example, shown with an italicizing one word, and I try to provide guidelines like that for the reader. I also try to write narrative in such a way that it feels like the events are unfolding in front of you and so that it feels movie-like or audio play-like. And that's what I was already doing even before I had any audiobooks recorded, because that's the way I thought, that's the way I wrote when I wrote the first version of Ender's Game, which was the novelette published in the August issue of Analog in 1977, I realized afterward that, because I didn't really know anything about writing fiction, what I had written was a play with stage directions and then with the monologue of what was going on in Ender's mind.
Orson Scott Card:I instinctively handled viewpoint reasonably well, so that I did the things that fiction only can do, which is getting inside the character's head. You can't do that in movies, can't do it in plays, but you can do it in fiction. But mostly my stories were dialogue and I felt comfortable with that dialogue and I felt comfortable with that. So when Ender's Game, the novel, came out, the only excitement was about the fact that it was getting nominated for awards, it didn't change the way we were living. We were already, by that time, self-supporting from my income as a writer.
Orson Scott Card:I had had to take an honest job for nine months in 1983. It's why I moved to Greensboro, north Carolina, and worked as an editor for Compute Magazine for their to be the editor of their book production. But so I was working with computers. I loved computers and I was a computer hobbyist at the time, not a bad programmer. I'm kind of proud of some of the programs I came up with.
Orson Scott Card:But I quit that job as soon as I could, because once you've been a freelancer it's hard to work for somebody and come into an office and have somebody else feel like they have a right to check in on what you're doing at any given moment. My wife never does that, because I don't think our marriage could have lasted if she had tried to monitor and supervise my writing. Just not something I can live with, but she's never tried that. Not something I can live with, but she's never tried that. So I was able to quit my job on the basis of the books the Tales of Alvin Maker. I sold those at that time and it was that advance that allowed me to go back to freelancing and I've never looked back. It was four or five years after Ender's Game came out that my royalties finally came to a level where we could live on the royalties and Ender's Game is about half my earnings just that one book, wow and during the early years.
Orson Scott Card:Well, my my agent, barbara bova ben bova's wife started as an agent. I was one of her first clients. I had already been selling to ben, and so it was natural for him to suggest me as someone she might want to represent. But she was the life changer. Uh, she's the one who got my numbers up a bit. Uh, I had been offered some good numbers before I had an agent, but I didn't know how to read a contract properly. So there were some bad things in some of those early contracts Not going to go into that, because that's boring shop talk for writers and nobody else cares about it but the most important thing she did was she developed a close relationship with an agent in New York whose specialty was selling books in Europe and other foreign markets, and so within the first couple of years of Barbara being my agent, I was making half my income from foreign sales, and the nice thing about foreign sales is I don't have to translate the books.
Orson Scott Card:Somebody else does that, and so what I get is just found money. I didn't have to write anything new, it's something I already wrote, and I now have readership in countries where I don't even come close to speaking the language and I'm very happy with that. Whenever I do go to a foreign convention, I find that in other countries most people, most educated people speak enough English that I don't really need translation to do public addresses. They'll set me up with an interpreter, but what happens is I'll say something and if there's something funny, the audience it sounds like everybody's laughing, and then, when it gets interpreted, a much smaller group will laugh, because those are the ones who didn't speak English well enough to understand what I'd said. But I'm impressed by the way that most foreigners are multilingual or at least bilingual. It's an old joke, but multilingual means you speak several languages. Bilingual means you speak two languages and if you speak only one language, that's called being an american, because we, we just don't. I mean people think they're learning a language in school but they're not.
Orson Scott Card:Um, when I studied spanish in high school and uh and in college, up to a medium level, and I also studied portuguese high school, which is very rare, but then I ended up going on my mission to Brazil as an LDS missionary and that training helped, but I did not really speak Portuguese as a result of any of my classes. Likewise, I still don't speak Spanish. I can make myself understood. I can say things, but if you start talking back to me in Spanish at a normal conversational clip, I am lost. You need to speak more slowly, with relatively separated words, and then I can understand Spanish.
Orson Scott Card:In Portuguese, though, I was able, by living in the country, to become reasonably fluent, fluent enough that Brazilians, instead of taking me for an American, took me for somebody from the southern part of Brazil that had been settled by Germans, which would explain in those days I was blonde, which would explain a tall blonde guy who was fluent in Portuguese, but I had a bit of a southern accent, which means a little bit of a Spanish accent. When you're talking about southerners in Brazil, and so you know, it was kind of fun to be called, some people would refer to me as that, that german, uh, which is what they call the, the southern blondes in in brazil, and that was flattering. But uh, the, the whole, the whole language thing. I love language, I love studying languages, I love reading about languages, uh, but I'm beyond the age where I can learn a new language. I tried a little bit with Polish.
Orson Scott Card:I have a wonderful readership in Poland, smart, smart people, and I just love the fact of knowing that my books are doing well in Poland, a country which intrigued me when they were fighting for their independence intrigued me when they were fighting for their independence, when Lech Walesa and the strikers in Danzig-Gdansk were getting their independence from the Communist Party. It was a really thrilling time to be observing them. So I think of it as a nation of heroes and that's the way I approach them. When I've been to Poland a few times that I've been there, I've just loved my time there, but what I found is that I can't. I learned how to pronounce Polish so that if you show me a sign, a billboard, I can say it out loud, and sometimes that means I can understand it because there are a lot of cognates, but usually it means I can understand it because there are a lot of cognates, but usually it means I can't. And so I'm by no means a Polish speaker or even a Polish reader, but I love faking it in other countries. Anyway, I'm babbling.
Orson Scott Card:This is where you're supposed to interrupt me and get me back to another subject. I know my wife sent you a letter saying you know, scott just fills dead air and uh and.
Orson Scott Card:I do, and if you're, if you're not stimulating, so well, I'm glad to know you feel that way, but I also always worry that when I'm on a telephone call like this, are you actually awake? Uh, so I, you know, have I bored you to sleep? Because, speaking of being awake people every now and then on I'm on Quora. It's the only Q-U-O-R-A Okay, it's the only online presence I have, because there's topics. It's not like Facebook where you just sign on and babble small talk, chat On Quora. People pose questions and then you answer them. Writers often will ask questions and one of the most frustrating ones for me is when they'll say I want my work to really stand out, I want it to be special. How can I do that? And the answer is you can't. It can't be done, you can't decide. Oh, now I'm going to write a special one. If they're not all special, why are you writing?
Orson Scott Card:So, you should write stories that you care about and believe in yourself and then hope that there are other people like you who will also care about and believe in that story. You just write it as clearly as you can and tell what happens and why, and so when I answer questions like that, I just say please stop thinking that way. You're not competing with other writers. They're not your competition. You're trying to appeal to audiences of readers who already love to read because of things that other people have written. You're not going to surpass them. Why would you care? Some readers will like your work better than somebody else's work. Other people will like that other guy better than you. Who cares? What matters is did you tell a story you care about, and did you tell it clearly enough that strangers can understand it and appreciate it? And if you've it clearly enough that strangers can understand it and appreciate it?
Brian Triger:And if you've done that, you've done your job.
Orson Scott Card:That's a good point, as far as popularity, popularity just takes care of itself. You know, there are people who think I'm the best writer of science fiction. I'm glad those people exist, but I don't agree with them, because there are too many science fiction writers that I admire more than I admire my work. But then again I also don't read my work. Once it's out there, what's the point of rereading it? All I'll do is become frustrated and disappointed in myself. So you know, there's no profit in rereading your own work unless you're involved in the audiobook. Then you can accomplish things that makes sense.
Brian Triger:Coincidentally, we're kind of on track to the next question. You mentioned quora and, but you also revealed maybe part of the answer. You you talked about being a computer hobbyist, so when, and memory, my memory escapes me as to which book it started in, but I remember uh, as Peter and Valentine are crafting their political careers, they're navigating the nets which uh happened to be before, I guess, early awareness of you know, the commercial internet.
Orson Scott Card:It was before the internet opened up.
Orson Scott Card:Yeah, so did you the internet used to just be for government and universities and so it wasn't public. So I was online with a service called delphi and also compu serve, and ender's game actually the manuscript of ender's game was uploaded to delphi um to be downloaded as just an ASCII novel. Some of the formatting was not preserved. Five people downloaded it. This was in the days of 1200-baud modems and so downloading a whole novel took a ridiculous amount of expensive online time. But I think that Ender's Game might have been the first new novel that was first published online for free back in those early days. But when I had them using the nets, when Peter and Valentine were doing it, I really was guessing at what it could become like when everybody had a connection. In the early days hardly anybody had modems. Even people who had computers didn't think of it as even interesting to try to go online. You couldn't download programs, you had to type them in, and that's the magazine that I worked at, compute Magazine Magazine in Greensboro, north Carolina. I was their book editor and one of the main things we did was to clean up people's amateur programs so that the code worked and to make sure that it ran, that if you type it all in correctly, then it's going to run on your computer. Nothing more frustrating than spending three hours typing in a program and then having error messages. That shouldn't happen. So that's one of the main things I did was just make sure the programming was clean. But that was a lovely thing to do in those days. The best computer for a home user in those days was the Atari 800.
Orson Scott Card:Bill Wilkinson designed the basic language, the programming language, that came with the computer, and he did a brilliant job because he called it his compiler printer, that you didn't have to write it and then compile it and then run it. It was compiling as it went. As you wrote it. It was being converted into machine language so that there was no delay. You type something and you run it. It just runs and so you got instant feedback. It was wonderful programming for that.
Orson Scott Card:But of course it doesn't take long before you want to start writing in machine language. But they call it assembly language because you have to compile that. But when you're working in BASIC all you do is get the code numbers for all of the commands you want to make and you poke them in using BASIC. So you have little machine language subroutines that you create that run usually in the interrupt cycle on the 6502 processor, and I loved that.
Orson Scott Card:I loved that processor and I loved that. I loved that. Basically, you have had a 256 by zero page, and so it felt like an infinite number of registers compared to the mere 16 registers that the IBM PC had when it first came out. Machine language on the IBM PC was a nightmare, as you spent all your time swapping data in and out of the registers and there were only 16 of them, so you had to keep changing them around to do anything. The 6502 processor was just fun and free. I loved working on it, but I stopped programming after, after the 6502 processors were all replaced by uh uh Intel's uh processors.
Brian Triger:Okay, Do you? And now I'm babbling again. No, are we betting on?
Orson Scott Card:it? No, but what did what? I believed that. Well, let's put it this way when Bill Gates was working on getting Windows to be a usable operating system which it's not quite at yet, but it's getting there he talked in the 90s about wanting to make the internet part of the desktop, and by then the internet had been opened up.
Orson Scott Card:But at first nobody knew what to do with the internet, and I remember many times saying what a waste of time to go on the internet because all these websites, all they are is the equivalent of the brochure rack at the grocery store. You couldn't do anything with them. Part of that was because you couldn't buy things that cost less. It was so expensive for them to use credit cards online that little things didn't work. I remember saying that the internet's not going to be worth anything until you can pay 10 cents for something.
Orson Scott Card:We're there now because of PayPal, but early on, no, it was a pain and you had to type your. They didn't remember your number. You had to type it in each time. Your operating system didn't remember your credit card numbers and sign ins and and you know your login name and password. It was. It took time for it to become usable, but I knew that it would become usable because it was the most convenient way to converse. And I don't know if you're old enough to remember I don't know how old you are, I've never seen you, but uh, um the sorry. I'm having a Joe Biden moment here, it's okay. And to and to.
Brian Triger:Just to give you some info, the oldest OS cause I I actually had a computer hobbyist in my family. I was lucky enough to have one of those was os2 warp, I think.
Orson Scott Card:And uh, I was born a year after ender's game was published, so 86, I'm about 39 oh, okay, okay, so, yeah, yeah, so you were alive and around as the internet first came out yep and as people started learning how to use it.
Orson Scott Card:But right, and like my kids, my first three kids are older than you because they were born in 78, 80, and 83. But not far from you we also have our youngest, who was born considerably later than that, in 94,. I believe, now that I've said that it'll be wrong because I have no calendar sense, it's one of those things when people are talking about poor Joe Biden and the memory lapses that show that he was a demented old man and shouldn't be president, I thought he's forgetting the exact kinds of things that I forget People's names, where I met them, who that face belongs to, and dates, dates, especially Horrible. I mean, I was around when each of my kids was born and I know the month that each of them was born in and I have little tricks that I can them was born in and I have little tricks that I can do to remind myself of their birthdays. But you know, I would never have, like Joe Biden, forgotten which year my child died in.
Orson Scott Card:My 17-year-old son died, the one who was born in 1983, in the year 2000. I don't forget that. I don't forget the date, I know when that happened and I think, okay, if you're forgetting the date that you lost a child, your brain is not working properly, because that's the worst thing in the world. And when that happens, it sticks. It sticks in even a memory like mine. But by and large, I have always been bad at the very kind of memory tricks that Joe Biden was having trouble with, including keeping the thread of a conversation, because I'll digress and then forget where I started and have no idea of how to get back where I started. And I have no idea of how to get back, uh, so if he's, if he was truly demented I mean, he was clearly slow and slowed down from what he had been when he was younger Uh, but you know, in my seventies now I'm getting slowed down too but, uh, as far as the kinds of things he was forgetting, I've never had a good time.
Orson Scott Card:I've never been able to remember them. Forgetting, I've never had a good time. I've never been able to remember them. Um, you know, for a guy who's been in musicals and had to perform songs, the fact that I have it's almost impossible for me to remember lyrics to music while I'm singing it. Um, that was a crippler for me. Um, because I had a decent singing voice. But it doesn't help if, if you don't know the words? Uh, it doesn't help you get through the show, anyway. Uh, another digression which has nothing to do with anything. You better take charge of this and get me back on some kind of track.
Brian Triger:I look forward to it. So I was just thinking about, uh, how often I forget where I park, and uh I um, let's see.
Orson Scott Card:So we all do that. If you go to a place where you have parked often, you remember being in every parking place. Well, the problem how do you remember which one was today?
Brian Triger:So my ignorant defense like the thing that justifies it when I'm starting to overanalyze to protect my own ego is well, the sun was in a different position and different cars were around and different people and different sounds, because I'm sensitive to audio. So if I was parking a static object which it's not in a static location or an environment, then I could remember, because I could just reference, you know, a specific thing. But if everything changes around it, since it's very low on the priority list, it's just going to be something, especially if it's a larger parking lot. I actually work on base nearby as a systems analyst and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of cars, so I play a little video game in my head and just expect that I'm going to look for my car for five or ten minutes.
Orson Scott Card:Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. My worst time in finding my car, though, was I have owned Hyundai Santa Fe's for my past five cars for the past my past five cars and so I changed them rather rapidly, because they kept upgrading the assist systems, and so that if I fell asleep while I was driving, I really needed to know that it would stay in my lane until I woke up a quarter of a second later. But in a quarter of a second you can find yourself in the wrong lane if you don't have lane assist, so that's why I changed so often. But I think my third Santa Fe was dark brown, so dark that at night it was black, and if you scan a parking lot, depending on the position of the sun, as you said, it would be a different color.
Orson Scott Card:I could never say to somebody can you run out to my car and get that? It's a brown Santa Fe? Now, if they could see that it was brown, it would be the only one in the lot. It was not a popular color, but they couldn't tell it was brown, and so telling them the brown Santa Fe wasn't going to help. It's just one of those weird things, but that was. I lost that car so often in parking lots because I would be scanning and then black cars would look familiar to me and my own car wouldn't wouldn't stand out all that well. So it's a good thing my wife drives this beautiful little baby blue Fiat that we just love the car, we love the color and it's the cutest car in every parking lot so we never have to search there. It is Cuteness just radiates from and then we find it easily.
Brian Triger:That's a good solution. So what's next, if anything, for Ender's Game? So I haven't Will, actually, yeah, I'll leave the question at that. What's next for Ender's Game?
Orson Scott Card:I mean, I don't expect that everybody has read every book in the Ender's Game universe, so I'm not offended when people haven't. But between me and Aaron Johnston, who's been working with me collaborating on the pre-Enders game books, the prequels there's one more of the prequels yet to come, okay, but I'm done. Okay, all of the books that I'm writing I have finished. Ender is twice dead and you know that's not a surprise. I structure all of my novels as biographies and if I don't take them through to death, at least I take them through to happily ever after, where you know nothing else of interest is going to happen in their lives except for just normal happiness. But I have finished, of course, remembering all my titles again, memory problems and remembering which one comes last. I can't remember right now the title of my. I think it was the Last Shadow. Might be the Last Shadow, yeah, but it wraps up the Shadow books and the ender books, uh, so that I think I've resolved everything that was causing any anxiety. Okay, but uh, I have no idea whether people particularly liked the way I ended it. What can I do about that, except for tell the best story I can think of? Uh, and I try never to write the same book twice. Even when I wrote Ender's Shadow, which is absolutely parallel with Ender's Game, I didn't mean it to be. I thought I was just writing Dean's story and that the first five chapters he had been involved in battle school and then would move on. But it turns out that there was a novel's worth of story to tell and it ends where Ender's Game ends begins, right at the same time frame. They they run parallel. That was never a plan, but it meant that the shadow books were following their course while the off-earth, off-world books had a course of their own. Speaker for the Dead was the real novel. That's the one that I meant to write. I had written the Ender's Game short story, but I had no plan to turn that into anything else. The Anders Games short story, but I had no plan to turn that into anything else.
Orson Scott Card:In those days, if somebody took a short story and made it into a novel, they usually did it by beginning with the short story because they knew they had an opening that would grab people, because it had been published before, etc. So if you win an award for a short story, there's pressure from yourself, if no one else, to then write the novel version, which begins with the short story. But I learned through several other adaptations most notably michael songbird being that when I adapted it into a song master that that is the opposite of what you should do. If you have a story that works, a short story that works, what's working is the climax of the short story, so that when they finish reading it, people will tell their friends you've got to read this, you've got to read this because they had such a great experience with the conclusion. If you have a great opening but it just peters out, nobody's gonna be rushing to hand it to their friends. Great openings are not as important to the success of an adaptation as you might think. So I learned with Michael Songbird that the way to do it was, instead of beginning with that successful short story from Analog, I started years before that and by the time I got to the events of that story, which were pretty much the climax of the book, I couldn't use a word of the original short story because I had created so much else in the world creation prior to reaching that point that nothing in the short story was still true of what happened to these characters.
Orson Scott Card:And that's what I did with Ender's Game when it was time to adapt it. I knew that the climax and the ending of Ender's Game were going to be what they had been in the story in the short story, and instead I started years earlier. I gave him a brother and sister parents and brought him up into battle school before he was a commander. The short story begins with the words remember, the enemy's gate is down and it's Ender in an early training session or the first training session of his own army. So that's well along in the novel and that's where the short story began.
Orson Scott Card:But my technique works If you've got a great short story that you really believe in, you think it should be a novel. Go back before and reinvent your character, start over, start with a new beginning much earlier, and then don't even look at the original story when you're getting to the same events, because now they'll be different, they'll mean different things, and so you have to write it differently. It's not the same novel to the character, and so because the character is different, everything is different. Anyway, there it is, scott Card's quick little how to adapt a short story into a novel course.
Brian Triger:So I'm going to admit I am one of those readers. I basically did just the traditional, I think, the first four, and then I read, I believe, at least the complete first book of Bean's story, Ender's Shadow. Yeah, the one called Ender's Shadow, yeah, and so I'm definitely not anywhere close to reading everything. But the other part of the question so partially it's because I haven't finished, but also, like I guess my question ties to, like you know, are there any plans maybe for a movie reboot or any other type of media attached to Ender's Game?
Orson Scott Card:Well, I have a plan and it's the Tolkien plan. The first adaptation of Lord of the Rings, of Fellowship of the Ring, was pretty awful, but nowhere near as bad as what came with the brilliant filming of the trilogy that won Academy Awards and et cetera. The filming was gorgeous, the acting excellent. The filming was gorgeous, the acting excellent. Uh, andy circus by himself was so brilliant that it would be worth watching his golem, even if nothing else in the movie were worth watching. Yeah, but I have.
Orson Scott Card:I was so bitterly disappointed because in the first movie they get to the point where they're leaving Galadriel. They're coming out of her lands of Lothlorien, and she gives them presents. And if you know the books, you know that one of the most gorgeous things in the book is the box of soil that she gives to Sam Gamgee and the seed, the mallorn seed that is in that box. And instead she gave him a rope. Now, rope was something that in the books he wishes he had brought, and more than one occasion. And they do give him rope, but they give it to him not as a great gift, it was just to help equip them for their trip. It was like giving them food. You do it, but it's not like enormous. But the moment that they did not, that the film did not have Sam be given by Galadriel that box of soil, I knew that they had made the hideous, evil decision to skip the scouring of the Shire in the last book. Yeah, which is not. You know the director, I can't remember his name. Now I block it out because I'm so angry. Still, I'm angry.
Orson Scott Card:Um said the problem with lord of the rings is it just keeps ending and ending and ending. It only feels that way if you're an idiot and you don't understand what's actually going on. Because, yes, it feels over, and yet they keep they head home. And then, when the hobbits reach the Shire, everything has gone to hell. The evil of Sauron has spread, by means of Saruman, into the Shire, treesrees have been cut down. Freedom is over. It's terrible events. So this is definitely the story is not over. There's no happily ever after there yet, except that these four hobbits, two of whom have been nothing but observers Well, almost nothing but observers Pippin and Merry. But now they, having drunk Entdraft, are taller than usual among the hobbits and they take charge and they drive the bad guys out. And it's a war, there's a battle, there's it, and it's vital for us to see what they've learned, what they have become because of the events, uh, of the lord of the rings.
Orson Scott Card:And yet what we also see is that frodo is not the leader. When he gets home, he's not even home. He, he's not happy, he doesn't belong there. He wore the ring for too long, and so the darkness, the injuries that he had, they're all playing on his soul. And so, at the end of the scouring of the Shire, frodo is able to go off and sail into the uttermost West on the straight road through the sea like an elf. It's sort of immortality, it's apotheosis, he's going to heaven, basically.
Orson Scott Card:But and here's the great reveal we realize that the protagonist of Lord of the Rings was never Frodo and it was never Gollum, it was Sam. And in this, as Tolkien calls it, this most Catholic of books, it makes perfect sense. It's the scripture that says whoever would be greatest among you, let him be the servant of all, and that's Sam Gamgee. He's the servant of all. He's the greatest among you, let him be the servant of all. And that's sam gamgee. He's the servant of all, he's the greatest among them. He wore the ring and gave it back and was unscarred by by the experience uh, unlike frodo. And at the end frodo fails he can't throw the ring in, the ring overpowers him and it's Gollum who causes the destruction of the ring. But Sam is the one who carried Frodo. At the end, when Frodo was exhausted and could not move, it's Sam who delivered Frodo and the ring to the cracks of doom. It's the, it's the meaning of the books, and for them to not understand that just meant that I re.
Orson Scott Card:I realized then that I was going to hate the storyline of the Lord of the Rings movies, and indeed I do.
Orson Scott Card:There were other gross mistakes that they made in the arrogance of filmmakers who think they can improve on the story. There were other gross mistakes that they made in the arrogance of filmmakers who think they can improve on the story. There is a movie that takes a good work of literature and improves it, one case that I'm sure of there may be others that I didn't know about, but sense and sensibility okay with a script by emma thompson turns out to be. It's not her strongest novel, but it is her strongest movie, jane austen's strongest movie, because emma thompson improved it. She structured it better, she understood structure better than j Jane Austen did in that early novel of hers. So everything from the novel is there. If you've watched that movie, you've read the book, you've got everything. She didn't write long books, and so it fit, but at the end of it you have a climax that is infinitely better than the brief, touching on things that Austen herself did. So that's a movie that's better than the book.
Brian Triger:How did you feel?
Orson Scott Card:Boy, is that?
Brian Triger:rare. How do you feel or how did you feel about?
Orson Scott Card:Ender's Game the first film adaptation. Are you cutting out here, because I have not heard a complete sentence here. Can you hear me in this question? Can you hear me here, cause I, I'm, I have. I have not heard a complete sentence here.
Brian Triger:Can you hear me in this question? Can you hear me now? Yes, okay, perfect. Uh, sorry about that. So how did you feel?
Orson Scott Card:So are you asking me about the Ender's game movie?
Brian Triger:Yes.
Orson Scott Card:Yeah, there is a movie there that has the title Ender's game. They have a character in it named End, character named Ender Wiggin, who is played by a 15-year-old who looks like he's six foot four. This character is supposed to be 10 years old, 10 to 12 years old, and during the key events, who's supposed to be small for his age. So basically, you take a Michael J Fox role and you cast Matthew McConaughey in it. Okay, great. But that's the least of the problems. The most important problem is not for one moment does Gavin Hood's script of Ender's Game bear any relation to the character of Ender Wiggin. He writes the stock Hollywood rebellious brat hero. I'm sick of that character anyway and I certainly did not write that character in Ender's Game. The way that Ender behaves in the movie, he would not be given the command of a flock of ducks. He is not a good commander in the movie, he's just bratty and insubordinate. Stock material, standard material for Hollywood crap fests. My Ender. I now understand. I wrote several scripts that didn't have ender properly in it, but I finally came to understand that what makes ender work, ender is in the movie. When at the end of the movie the audience wishes he were their commander. That that would be the right script and that's what it is in my audio play Ender's Game Alive is.
Orson Scott Card:I've adapted it so that Ender is Ender and what really, for my money, what makes it work is his relationship with the other kids His opponents, yes, but that's not important. What matters is his relationship with his friends, because and this is the reason why, by the way, it has been used by the military in some of their training for officers because Ender Wiggin is an ideal officer. He knows his men, he has trained his men, but his men are not tools that he uses to advance his own career. On the contrary, he uses his time and effort to try to help them become stronger and better. And they sense that, they know that he cares more about them than he does about his own career.
Orson Scott Card:And when that's the case, you trust your commander. You know that he's not going to waste your life. Yes, you're going to be sent into harm's way. Yes, there's a good chance that you might lose life or limb, but if you trust your commander, you know that whatever you lose will be worth it, because you will never be wasted. You will never be thrown away by this commander, because the commander loves you and you love him.
Brian Triger:I think it would be really cool to see a film adaptation that genuinely spends time within the universe or within the enderverse. I mean, I'm not an expert when it comes to literature or movie production, but as a consumer, aside from what you've mentioned, it just felt like, um, you know, uh, there were dramatic time skipping. There was uh, just character. I think most, if not all, of the characters were very flat and I didn't feel like time was being spent within the universe that you created. Um, you know, it just wasn't. Uh, like you mentioned mentioned, it was more of a copy and paste with a stock hollywood's uh script and um, and that was unfortunate. I still didn't mind watching it a couple of times because it was nice to see something right, like you know, I so, but um, I, and the film was better than it would have been if Gavin had been the only director.
Orson Scott Card:But, unbeknownst to Gavin hood himself, harrison Ford contributed vastly, as as a co-director, because he knows how to talk to actors, which Gavin hood absolutely did not know I was. I spent a little time on set. There was one scene that I was supposed to be in just my voice, not my body, but I was on the set giving my lines um, as Harrison and and uh, asa were together, uh, in this little intimate scene on their way to command school. And it's a good scene because of Harrison's Ford. He would do things like you know, gavin Hood came in and gave these meaningless crap statements about oh, this is the feeling, this is the way it's supposed to go, and you know all this Stanislavski method bullshit that has nothing to do with actual acting. And what Harrison Ford did was between takes he would say to Ace okay, this time I'm going to touch your arm on this line. It warned him what was coming and I would watch. And just that movement changed the entire timing of the scene, changed the meaning of the scene, and it was brilliant. But then he wouldn't repeat that the next take. He would say, okay, this time I'm going to try this. And so I don't know if Asa Butterfield is ever going to be able to profit from it or if he even realized that he was getting a course in film acting from Harrison Ford. Because all those little things in a fairly tight scene like that, every single one of those things changes the mood and the tone and the pace of the scene. And the end I realized.
Orson Scott Card:And I asked harrison ford afterward, what was he doing? You know, did what was his goal in that? And he said I just like to give the editor different versions of the scene so they can pick the best one. Well, yes, I mean and that consciously I mean, that really is what happens. But there were no bad takes. When Harrison Ford is in the scene, there are no bad takes. And that's an important thing to realize about an actor.
Orson Scott Card:Harrison Ford doesn't get credit for being a great actor because, like John Wayne, he's kind of Harrison Ford every time. And so you think, well, he's not acting, he's just being himself man. That's because they have people who say that have no idea how devilishly hard it is to naturally play yourself in film. It's so much easier to overact and to be the hero or this and that, but to just be yourself. Oh, anyway, he can be himself or his film self, because I'm sure that as a human being he doesn't say all those wry things uh, because you lose friends. But, um, he is a superb film actor and when you look back at his work, his body of work, you realize every movie that he's been in has been better because he was in it. He's the reason Star Wars was a success.
Orson Scott Card:People don't understand that, but we have it on record from several people that before they shot a frame they had the script, they did a reading and he talked to the other actors Because you know, lucas was a kid. What did Lucas know about directing? He said to the other actors look, this film will work if we play it straight. It's not tongue-in-cheek, it's not a straight, it's not tongue in cheek, it's not a joke, it's not a comedy. There'll be laugh moments, but our characters all have to mean what they say and be absolutely sincere about being in jeopardy, about having goals they want to meet, about fearing death or bad things. That's the way they played it and that's why it worked. If they had done it tongue-in-cheek, like Spaceballs or, like Robin Hood, men in Tights, it would have failed and would have been no more than a footnote in film history. Not even that really in film history. Not even that really. But because of Harrison Ford the performances were all absolutely serious and straight, so the audience knew to take the story seriously instead of treating it as a joke. If they treat it as a joke, there would not have been lines around the block the first few weeks of its opening. It would not have been such a the block the first few weeks of its opening. It would not have been such a monster hit right from the start. So you know, find the right actress, find the right cast, you can improve a bad movie.
Orson Scott Card:Ender's Game was set to be a bad movie because it had a director who did not understand the story at all and who was not good at working with actors. That's a deadly combination. And the script was weak because that same director had written it Always a mistake, I think, because the director then can't see anything else to do with it than what he intended from the start. And that's not enough. You need the collaboration of the fresh eyes of an excellent director to take a good script and make it sing on screen. That's what Ender's Game will eventually get. My guess is that it will be in the form of a two-part miniseries. Doesn't need more than that because it's not a long book, but the number of hours that I had in Ender's Game Alive would be nice to have.
Orson Scott Card:And I think of the first great mini adaptation of miniseries uh, obviously roots, but that was episodic so it doesn't count. Um, pride and prejudice by jane austen, one of the finest works of literature in the history of english, uh, and the one that established viewpoint the modern novel. I think of literature in the history of English and the one that established Viewpoint the modern novel. I think of it as the first truly modern novel. It had had one film adaptation before. It had had one with an outstanding cast and everybody was good, but it wasn't Pride and Prejudice because there wasn't time. So when it came on as a miniseries on the BBC and that got moved over to America as a miniseries the one this is the one with Colin Firth it was I don't know if you noticed this or if it was even. You were probably too young to even appreciate it when it first came out, but it was a phenomenon. It attracted so many viewers way more than anybody expected because it was a brilliant story, brilliantly told. They didn't have to change anything. They filmed one of the finest works of literature in English straight and then had a brilliant cast. The cast was amazing. Now, after that, there was a one feature adaptation with. Was it Jennifer Garner? No, what's her name? Anyway, another adaptation. Jennifer Garner, no, what's her name? Anyway, another adaptation, and it's good. And if that were the only thing we had, we'd be happy with it. But I want for Ender's Game, I want to have the treatment that Pride and Prejudice got in the Colin Firth version, because I think there's enough character and enough development in Ender's Game to be worth that kind of time. I think it could hold the audience's attention and be rewarding. But it will not happen while I'm alive. I'm 73 years old.
Orson Scott Card:Ender's Game did not fail the movie that Gavin Hood made. It just didn't inspire. You know. It probably made a slight profit. It's probably, of course. You know, in Hollywood no movie ever makes a profit, because then they'd have to share profits with the profit participants. So I'm sure that they found ways to make it so that it came out even.
Orson Scott Card:But it didn't fail. It was a respectable um performance financially, but not a tentpole uh franchise establishing movie, partly because when studio executives saw it, none of them were moved. They didn't, and they didn't know what all the hoopla was about. To them it was the Last Starfighter again, because the Last Starfighter was the first adaptation of Ender's Game. They just didn't admit it. But it was no more than the last star fighter and that wasn't a tent pole franchise establisher either. So there's nobody who wants to put more money into Ender's game, but it will happen. And here's when it will happen when the studios are headed by people who grew up, as you did, on Ender's Game, where Ender's Game already existed and it moved you when you were a kid. Those guys are not yet in charge of the studios. They will be, but it's still old men and they don't know what ender's game should be. But if you became a studio head you would know what it should be, yeah, so, uh, you might very well say we're going to make a two-part movie out of this.
Orson Scott Card:I think of dune, which had two sad, sad adaptations the David Lynch one, where he spends a half hour on crap that isn't even in the movie, in the book, establishing these worm-like creatures in these vats and it does not matter, it isn't even used anywhere in the movie the fact that we've seen those scenes Really. Just a guy who lost his way immediately and the movie was bad, genuinely bad. When we were laughing out loud at I am the shout out mapes, you know, when you have a wonderful actor saying that line, it's as bad as in one of the star wars. People is the first one, phantom menace anyway, where poor jake lloyd was made by the bad script by george lucas was made to cry out yippee, oh, laughable, pathetic, pathetic. And I, I, you know those things happened in the david lynch version, the uh next.
Orson Scott Card:One can't remember now the name of the actor who played, uh, paul atreides, but but uh, he did a good job. But the script still wasn't. But when they did it in two parts and they had the shockingly beautiful but also extraordinarily talented Timothee Chalamet in the lead, what a difference that made having the right lead actor, actor. His casting was as important to those two Dune movies as the casting of I've already mentioned him the guy who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. Just absolutely pivotal and a brilliant performance and a script that allowed him to really be Paul Atreides, so that we could understand why people loved him.
Brian Triger:I just rewatched the revisiting Gollum's story, if I'm not mistaken, in like 2026. Taken in like 2026, well, the live action films at least I heard.
Orson Scott Card:I heard a rumor read like a, just a headline or two tied to uh, why would? Why would they be doing anything with gollum?
Brian Triger:the movies exist understandable but, maybe the journey of his character.
Orson Scott Card:So just the date okay okay, yeah, the same people who thought there were three movies in the Hobbit which there weren't. Yeah, I might very well think that that Gollum deserves a movie of his own.
Brian Triger:Well, maybe Gollum's going to go on some errands.
Orson Scott Card:Well, he's dead now. No, no, no, I know during, during his adventures.
Brian Triger:I um, but yeah, I do agree with you.
Orson Scott Card:Yeah I mean, I can imagine a movie about the hobbit being made and as long as they cast andy circus and as long as they get good writing for his character, great, that's wonderful. But uh, I have very low hopes of that because of how unwatchably bad so much of the Hobbit was. There was some that was good. I ended up watching the whole thing, but with great impatience. I think it's the first of the Hobbit movies, but maybe it's the second. When they are coming out of the elves' realm on those barrels and those kegs, I walked away. I was watching them at home, walked away, went to the bathroom, grabbed a bite to eat, came back in and they were still in the barrels.
Orson Scott Card:That's how long and tedious that sequence was. It's something that deserved two minutes of screen time and I don't know how much it actually got. It felt like a half hour Probably was only about eight or nine minutes, because every minute on screen is a million bucks. So they were careful of their budget, I'm sure. But anyway, maybe they can make a good movie out of, out of uh um gollum. But he is a despicable human being. That's. One of the things you have to remember is that we feared Gollum. We knew that he would be utterly selfish, no matter what. We knew that he was a murderer who had murdered his best friend to get the stupid ring. And after that, where do you go, you?
Brian Triger:follow the ring.
Orson Scott Card:Yeah, you follow the ring, but then that story's already been told, and so I mean you're right, it could be done. But it would only matter to people who knew and loved the trilogy, the original trilogy, and, that being the case, they'll probably make their money back. If they do that, that would make sense, because making your money back is the miracle that every filmmaker is trying to do, as they want to get a big enough budget to make it right, but then they have to make it so right that it makes back that budget, and that's hard to do and nobody knows how to do it. Every time, even a director as fine as ron howard, with hit after hit, he's had some flops. He's had some movies that did not work. Um, there are other examples. You know, george lucas. Of course, it's only on a memory of films one and two that any of the other films work, because you have to already care. Um, my wife just handed me a note saying that we need to leave in 10 minutes, which means that I have babbled so much. Okay.
Brian Triger:One more question. I promise I'll keep it to like 30 seconds to a minute and make sure you cut me off.
Orson Scott Card:I will. I promise You're not the problem, I'm the problem.
Brian Triger:So any quick, just seeds of wisdom for current and future creatives that venture out into the world, whether they're writing, creating film, podcasting, any type of creative works, personally and or professionally, like from your own experiences, any inspiring work.
Orson Scott Card:I'll sum up with some of the things I've said to my writing students. First of all, remember you're a human first and an artist second. If you ever let the artist get ahead of being the human, you're the scum of the earth. Your children are more important than anything you'll ever create as an artist. Your spouse is more important than anything you will ever create If you don't live a good life. Who cares about the art? Now I realize that obviously we do care about other people's artists who lived scummy lives, but the people around them got no joy from it. So be a good person, a loving person, first, and then take care of your body.
Orson Scott Card:It's so easy as a writer to become what I am a fat, lazy slob sitting in a recliner with a laptop propped up on his lap. I'm not healthy, I'm not strong. I went through a strong phase. I ran, I got to the right weight, I was fine, but then my son died in 2000. And after that I kind of fell apart. I stopped caring and it was hard for me to write. It was hard for me to do anything, but at least my body knew what it was like to be healthy for about five years, and you got to get those good five years. I see so many writing writing students and young writers who are letting their body go to seed and it's all you got. If you're not healthy, you're not going to do your art Well, you need to have a working, functional body. Okay, those are the personal advice things. Thank you.
Orson Scott Card:Then, as an artist, here's the next bit, and this is also important as an artist, to succeed, pay no attention to the kind of crap they teach you in school. No, there are no such things as three-act movies unless they're a trilogy. The three acts can be applied to any movie, whether they have three acts or not. It's a nonsense thing that gives you the illusion of structure. There are structures, but uh, and I've taught them, they're in my books, but they're not formulas. You know anybody who says that minute 22, you should be doing this. That's. That's complete crap. And the instructions to writers that they give them, the advice they give them, all useless. Here's what it is.
Orson Scott Card:Story is everything, everything. If you have a good enough story, the audience will forgive you almost any number of writing flaws, as long as you have the story, which is why you can make the hideous mistake of making the Hunger Games series in present tense, which is a vile mistake. English does not tell stories well in present tense. French does, english doesn't. But even if you make that mistake, the story was so good that the readers were willing to forgive the clumsiness of present tense writing. And so you concentrate on the tale, tell what happens and why, as clearly as you can Tell a story that you care about, that you believe in and help the readers to care about it and believe in it too, and that's all you think about.
Orson Scott Card:You don't think about your career. You don't think about what will sell. That's bull. What will sell is excellence, and excellence gets redefined whenever somebody comes out with a new excellent book. So you don't worry about what the latest bestseller has been. That's what your agents, all the agents, try to get you to write is last year's bestseller. They're always wrong, because next year's bestseller comes from a writer who writes something to believe in and care about, and they'll do it their own way, in their own voice.
Orson Scott Card:You don't have to think about style. You have a style. If you're thinking about style, it's like thinking about pedaling while you're riding a bike. You're going to fall over. You can't maintain it. If you're thinking about the pedaling. The pedaling just comes naturally, automatically. Your style comes out of you automatically, and anything you do that you are conscious of is going to wreck the story. You just tell what happens and why as clearly as you can, and then you'll be fine. There's nothing else to it. All the other things you'll learn tons of things along the way, but whatever I learned that makes book A work is going to be not particularly helpful in book B.
Orson Scott Card:It's like raising children. I knew I was a brilliant father when our firstborn, our boy, was a baby. I did everything right. My wife did everything right. We knew how to raise children till we got child number two, who is also a brilliant and beautiful human being, but nothing like her brother. Nothing that we learned in raising Jeffrey had anything to do with raising Emily, and likewise with our other kids. They're all different and you have to invent. Whatever you're going to invent that will work with each one, and so that's. It's true of every novel, it's true of every movie, the stuff that you knew how to do because of your successful great hit that made them give you millions of dollars to write this next thing. None of that will help, because you're solving a whole new set of problems. You don't ever want to become formulaic. You've got to tell stories that you care about and believe in, and follow the story where it takes you. Anyway, there it is all my writing advice, and now I've got to go, because we've got to pick up my grandkids at the airport.
Brian Triger:Perfect.
Orson Scott Card:And so we're heading off to do that. Well, thanks for letting me battle. You've been very patient, so I hope that this is in any way useful for you.
Brian Triger:Yeah, thank you for your time. Thank Mrs Card as well. She was very kind every time that we spoke. And enjoy your day and your weekend as well.
Orson Scott Card:Well spoke and enjoy your, your day and your weekend as well. Well, I'm I'm going to enjoy myself. Hope you enjoy working with this material and thank you for giving me a chance to have this conversation. I really appreciate it bye, bye, mr. Card take care we'll see you, thank you.
