Posts Tagged ‘Orson Scott Card’

So I’ve been exchanging email with one of these Christmas Book novelists – you know the kind, the smallish, hardbound, bright-covered books pioneered by people like Richard Paul Evans. This author wrote a decent post last week about why you leave sex and swearing out of your books, and I commented on it, so we’ve been in contact. My comment was essentially to say that leaving sex and swearing out of your book is all well and good, unless the things and the people you’re writing about require sex and language to be truly alive. Mormon writers especially (though not exclusively) like to write about these hard-bitten black sheep that find their way home, but even WHITE sheep are far more disposed to swearing and cruelty and sleeping around than they get portrayed in these novels. They come off as fake. It takes me about two pages to tell that we’re dealing with another one of these silly Mormon fictions, in which there aren’t any actual people, just Sunday School versions of people masquerading as human. Gerald Lund is like this for me, for instance.

But I thought, this guy seems like a pretty decent fellow, so I’ll give him a shot. I had Jeanette pick up a couple of his books at the library and last night I started reading one of them. I’m two chapters in, and I’m done. Cannot go on. I do not care a jot about any of the people I’ve met so far. Well, that’s not true. There is ONE character – who has not appeared yet, but has been discussed by two others – that I find mildly interesting, a gal that is blowing off the double funeral of her parents because she’s running a business and can’t get away. I’m not that sort of person, but I find that sort of person entirely believable. She’s the only one so far that strikes me as plausible.

The black sheep, for instance, is off in Brazil when he gets the call on the satphone to come home for the funeral. He does. On the way, he meets this gorgeous Brazilian babe and takes her out for the evening after, essentially, telling her that they’re going to spend the night together. And then, at the opportune moment, he finds that he’s so tormented by the memory of his old flame back at the homestead that he can’t sleep with her. That’s complete and utter garbage. Black sheep don’t behave that way. MISSIONARIES have a hard time behaving that way. What, is the author afraid that we’re not going to approve of this guy if he behaves the way humans do? Is the author unaware of the entirely casual nature of sex outside of certain districts of Provo, to say nothing of Brazil? The whole thing struck me as so ridiculously sanitized that I gave up. It isn’t even sanitized that way you see in, say, Dick Francis novels, where the love interest and the hero finally get together and you know they get together, but Francis doesn’t have to describe the pulsating loins of it all. It makes sense. It is what these people would do. It doesn’t make them less.

The end of my comment to this guy, I wrote that it often seems to me in the Mormon adult genre, that the authors have taken a story and crammed it into the genre so that it would sell, rather than telling the story the way it is and letting the genre find the tale. And this is EXACTLY what this guy is doing. And that’s why I don’t read Mormon adult fiction, except for Card, who seems capable of avoiding this trap, somehow.

Not sure why I opened the day with this when I’m supposed to be writing a business plan for investors, but I do feel better.

Seriously, if you’re not waiting with bated breath for every installment of Uncle Orson Reviews Everything, there’s something deeply wrong with you.  But today, well, today I read the latest installment, in which Uncle Orson (Orson Scott Card, for the layman, author of Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and a couple dozen other novels of amazing depth and great power) says goodbye to Barbara Bova, one of the greats in the literary world, and a person that despite this you have never heard of.

Here’s a bit of it, which I’m only providing to you because I know you’re going to go and read the whole thing:

Her loyalty was not merely professional, it was personal. She love us and we loved her. Even when we disagreed about what should be done with this contract or that writing project, even when I refused to make changes a publisher was insisting on, even when I was late turning in a book, she never gave up on me, and continued to give me and my books the benefit of her best thought and strongest efforts.

Barbara fought fiercely for us, as fiercely as she fought cancer this past year. She told almost no one of the personal battle she was going through, and only when it was clear that the treatments had all failed did she telephone us and tell us good-bye. A week later she was gone.

I feel her absence every day.

My greatest wish, and at the heart I believe my only wish, is to live a life that someone of that skill will write something of such beauty about me in my memory.

Cj

P.S. Apropos of that, one of the great geniuses of Card is that although I never met Barbara Bova, or Valentine Wiggin, or almost any of the people he knows or characters he’s created, when he writes them, I love them the way he does.  I can’t imagine the skill required for this.  It is one of the things that prevents me from being a writer – that I see how it can be done well, and despair that I can do it, knowing that a lesser effort will not satisfy me.

The other reason is that I haven’t the discipline.  Yet.  But that’s a topic for another time.