It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.
Card has to establish Ender as being really smart, so he has to give him moments of wisdom that are beyond his years. And that’s just the beginning of the rule-breaking. What I eventually realized, though, was that when Card broke the rules, it was for a reason that served the story.
In many ways, what Card really teaches in his classes is the same lesson that Ender eventually learns in Battle School: there are no rules. The first time Ender breaks a rule is when Bonzo tells him not to fire a shot during battles. Ender follows the rule at first, and then one day, he steps through the gate and saves the army from total defeat by firing. He waited to break the rule until the cost of following the rule was higher than that of ignoring it.
In fact, during class, Card had even said, “You can break any of the rules as long as you understand the cost.” Even though I dutifully wrote that down in the notes I took, it wasn’t until I saw that principle at work in Ender’s Game that I understood how much freedom a writer has. Or that, with that freedom, comes a responsibility to the reader. If a writer is going to break the rules, he has to do it with deliberate intention and an understanding of the effect.
In my journal, when the camp ended, I wrote “that it was as if someone had taken off the top of my head and said, ‘You don’t have to stop here.’”
What I want to show you is all the ways that Card subverts the rules in Ender’s Game, and what he gains by doing it.
“Avoid starting with unattributed dialogue” (Orson Scott Card, 2005 Literary Boot Camp)
At the start of a story, the reader has to build the world based on the information the author provides. This makes the order in which the author unveils information very, very important. Starting with unattributed dialogue means that readers have to work harder to understand what is happening. They don’t know the setting or who is speaking. Heck, they don’t even know the gender of the character. In reality, it is a very rare instance in which one would know nothing about the environment before hearing someone speak. Even in a dark room, it’s almost always possible to tell the gender of the person speaking.
With a line of unattributed dialogue, readers are at sea. What winds up happening is that readers will see the dialogue and then have to re-read and re-process it once they know where the story is set and who is speaking. It’s presenting the information backwards and is an extra step that slows down readers’ engagement with the story. The simplest example is when a reader thinks that a character is one gender and then finds out that the character is the other. More complex and less predictable are readers’ assumptions about a character’s emotional state. Take the sentence: “What did you say?” Without context, that could be an angry parent, a confused child, or a girl in a dive bar. Card taught us to give that context right up front so that we could control our readers’ perceptions and guide them through the story.
And yet.
I know you’ve read it, but just flip open to the first page of Ender’s Game. Card started the novel not just with a line of unattributed dialogue but an entire half-page of it.
There is no setting. There are no dialogue tags. He tells us nothing about the people who are speaking. It’s more like an unattributed transcript than anything else.
This does make the reader work harder to figure out who the speakers are and what they are talking about, but because we can see that section is so short, it also acts to pique our curiosity. He turned the weaknesses of starting with dialogue into a strength but is able to do so, I think, only because he has a firm understanding of the effect it has on a reader.
It tells us that the story is not about the people who are speaking. If this scene started in a tight third-person point of view, we would start to get emotionally invested in the characters. By having us eavesdrop, in essence, by denying them names, a location, or even genders, Card is able to focus our attention on the subject of their conversation and away from them. Who is this kid they are talking about? It makes us want to know more about him, and then Card immediately follows up by giving us a scene from Ender’s point of view.
Because he answers the question of Who are they talking about? right away, it builds audience trust that he will answer the other questions, such as Who is speaking?, What is important about this kid?, and What are the buggers?
So, although this looks like a violation of a principle that Scott teaches, it is actually adhering to the other, more important one: you can do anything, as long as you understand the cost.
In this case, Card was paying the cost of some disconnection with his audience in exchange for a heightened tension. It’s not a trick that can be used often, but it worked very well here.
“Trading viewpoints requires a clear division—a chapter break or line space. The limited third-person narrator can never change viewpoints in mid-scene” (Orson Scott Card, Characters and Viewpoint)
Among writers in the science fiction community, this is almost a mantra that we repeat to new writers. It’s such a common beginner’s mistake to jump around in viewpoint that it actually has a shorthand name: head-hopping, called that because of the sensation of hopping from one person’s head to another. It is jarring for a reader suddenly to get thoughts from someone else.
Most of Ender’s Game is written in limited third-person narration. However, Card breaks rules with point of view in a couple of places. The most interesting of these—or to put it more accurately, the one that made my head explode with wonder—is in chapter twelve.
Card starts the scene in Ender’s point of view, then he changes viewpoint characters to Bean, at mid-chapter, with no line breaks. This should be a flaw, but watch what he does.
Ender shook his head. “All I know is, the game’s over.” He folded up the paper. “None too soon. Can I tell my army?”
“There isn’t time,” said Graff. “Your shuttle leaves us in twenty minutes. Besides, it’s better not to talk to them after you get your orders. It makes it easier.”
“For them or for you?” Ender asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned quickly to Bean, took his hand for a moment, and then headed for the door.
“Wait,” said Bean. “Where are you going? Tactical? Navigational? Support?”
“Command School,” Ender answered.
“Pre-command?”
“Command,” said Ender, and then he was out of the door. Anderson followed him closely. Bean grabbed Colonel Graff by the sleeve. “Nobody goes to Command School until they’re sixteen!”
Graff shook off Bean’s hand and left, closing the door behind him.
Bean stood alone in the room, trying to grasp what this might mean.
See? He uses the action of the scene, in which Ender is ushered out of the room, to manage the transition. The camera, as it were, stays in the room and remains focused on Bean. It is a very simple trick, in which he directs the reader’s attention through the narrative. For Ender, the scene is over dramatically. His next several hours are going to be spent traveling. If Card had followed him, then the tension would have dropped off. Bean, on the other hand, still has questions and can maintain the dramatic tension that Card worked so hard to build. If he had followed convention and had a line break there, it would have interrupted the momentum of the scene. In this case, adhering to standard practice would have exacted a greater cost than playing with the rules. By breaking them, Card keeps the tension high and the reader engaged.
“Don’t violate the time-flow of the story” (Orson Scott Card, 2005 Literary Boot Camp)
The idea here is that humans experience time in a linear fashion, so stories that follow a straight time-flow are easier to grasp. They feel more natural because they meet the readers’ expectations of how time works. It feels like the narrative is unfolding as though it were real life. Within that
, a flashback is a recognized technique that mimics the way memory works.
There’s another thing that might be called a flash-forward. It’s when the narration says something like, “At the time, he didn’t understand. Later, he realized that…” Usually it jars readers out of a story, even if it is on an unconscious level, by reminding them that this is a story. It’s not just that it points out the presence of the narrator, but it reduces the tension by suggesting that the events being described had happened in the past.
In chapter four, Card violates the time-flow.
He imagined the ship dangling upside down on the undersurface of the Earth, the giant fingers of gravity holding them firmly in place. But we will slip away, he thought. We are going to fall off this planet.
He did not know its significance at the time. Later, though, he would remember that it was even before he left Earth that he first thought of it as a planet, like any other, not particularly his own.
When Card pulls the stunt of “Later, he would remember…,” it comes at a cost. It reminds us that this is a narrative. That price buys him something, though.
It makes us pay attention to this moment by adding significance to it. If Ender is going to remember this moment later, then the reader should as well. Most of the time, with something that you want the character and reader to remember later, you expand the moment and have it play out longer. You make it more emotionally significant, in the moment, to the character, and then you drop reminders of it later. Here, it’s not an emotionally important moment to Ender. It’s just a game that he is playing with his imagination and understanding of gravity. Trying to expand the scene wouldn’t work here because it would slow the pacing down and delay the moment when we arrive at Battle School. Again, this is a place where Card turns a weakness into a strength. He uses the narrator to point at something that is insignificant to Ender in that moment but is significant to the overall narrative. Does he remind us that we’re reading a story? Yes. But that consciousness is what cements the moment in our mind.
Again, in chapter fourteen, Card pulls what appears to be the same trick and violates the time-flow.
The next day was his last day in Command School, though he didn’t know it.
In this case, the thing he’s buying is not the implantation of a memory. This time, when he breaks that rule, he is asking the reader to pay more attention. It’s like saying, “This scene I’m about to show you? It’s not going to go down the way you think it is. Pay attention.” It reminds the reader that a narrator is there. It’s almost a dare, like he’s telling us to go ahead and try to guess what will happen next.
The challenge is that if the pay-off isn’t as cool as the reader’s guess, the author risks losing the reader completely. At the same time, that break seems necessary here.
All through chapter fourteen, we’ve been in Ender’s head, and he’s seriously dazed with exhaustion. It’s easy to drift into a fugue state with him. That moment of violating the time-flow snaps a reader out of it. It comes at a cost, but the cost of reminding us that this is a story is very much worth the dramatic tension it buys.
“Don’t make aliens that are just like [x] but smart” (Orson Scott Card, 2005 Literary Boot Camp)
Card isn’t the only one who teaches this these days. It’s the sort of rule that makes sense because, if aliens evolved on another planet, why would they have anything in common with life on Earth? In his book, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, he also says: “I always start the alien-building part of the session by asking, ‘How do these aliens differ from human beings?’ I reject the obvious similes. ‘They’re like cats.’ ‘They’re like dogs.’ I insist on something truly strange.”
But in the same book, Card talks about how he took this rule and deliberately broke it when he created the formics. “Who was the enemy they were training to fight? Other humans? No, aliens—cliché aliens at that. Bug-eyed monsters. Our worst nightmares, only now they were here in real life.”
It’s interesting to examine the way in which he took that cliché of the giant insect and made a believable society for it. So let’s look at how he got the readers to buy it.
He does this in layers. In the second chapter, Peter and Ender play astronauts and buggers, complete with a rubber mask. This is actually a fairly meta-moment, when you think about it. Card created aliens based on the cliché of the bug-eyed rubber mask aliens of film and television, then hangs a flag on it by having a scene with an actual rubber mask. It allows him to acknowledge the cliché and then move on.
By also making it a children’s game, it eases the reader into the idea of what the formics are rather than confronting them with the idea of bug-eyed monsters right up front. Children simplify things, so the reader can still think that, although the formics might have bug-like characteristics, they won’t turn out to be actual bugs.
As the book progresses, though, we get comfortable thinking about the formics as bugs, just the way everyone else in the Enderverse does.
By the time we get to chapter fourteen, we’ve bought into the idea of the formics as giant bugs. So we are ready for the last layer.
Mazer Rackham says, “And something else. Something so childish and stupid that the xenobiologists laughed me to silence when I said it after the battle. The buggers are bugs. They’re like ants and bees. A queen, the workers.”
Again, this is hanging a flag on something that ought to be a weakness. Mazer tells us, flat out, that this is a stupid idea. But Card has spent the entire book telling us how incredibly smart Mazer Rackham is, so at this moment, when he says the idea is stupid, we know that it’s not.
We have, at this point, completely bought into the idea of giant insects.
“Dreams have no author. In stories they are a cheap way to add sub-text” (Orson Scott Card, 2005 Literary Boot Camp)
A real dream is a random collection of images. Your brain stitches the images together to have meaning after the fact, but real dreams are never as tidy as they are in fiction. Many beginning authors will use dreams as a way to shed some light on the interior landscape of a character, rather than doing the work of carrying that character’s emotional baggage through into their waking life. It falls flat with readers because waking and dreaming don’t mirror each other so precisely.
In Ender’s Game, there are a long string of nightmares and dreams that plague Ender, culminating in a series of them in chapter fourteen after Ender has been pushed through battle after battle in Command School. He is clearly breaking down, and he dreams of Valentine, Peter, and of being vivisected by formics. Card makes these dreams work by employing two different tricks. In the first case, Ender thinks he is dreaming but is not.
In his dream, the voices sounded like Colonel Graff and Mazer Rackham. But that was the way dreams were, the craziest things could happen, because he dreamed he heard one of the voices saying, “I can’t bear to see what this is doing to him.” And the other voice answered, “I know. I love him too.”
Because of the other scenes with Colonel Graff, we know that this is something that he would actually say. It is easy to believe the same of Mazer Rackham, so as a reader, we know that Ender is not dreaming.
But Card goes one step further and hangs a flag on the unnaturalness of dreams in literature when the narration says, “That was the way dreams were, the craziest things could happen.” By acknowledging that dreams are inherently disjointed and random, he lets the reader know that showing us a coherent dream is an intentional choice. It is the authorial equivalent of saying, “I know this sounds crazy, but trust me.”
He needs that trust because he then pushes the envelope of what dreams can do even further with the second of the two tricks I mentioned.
But in the night he thought of other things. Often he remembered the corpse of the Giant, decaying steadily; he did not remember it, though, in the pixels of the picture on his desk. Instead it was real, the faint odor of death still lingering near it. Things were changed in his dreams. The
little village that had grown up between the Giant’s ribs was composed of buggers now, and they saluted him gravely, like gladiators greeting Caesar before they died for his entertainment. He did not hate the buggers in his dream; and even though he knew that they had hidden their queen from him, he did not try to search for her.
Clearly, this is too coherent to be an actual dream. If it came early in the novel, most readers would think, “Oh please,” because the dream is so thematically laden. I can almost picture the Battle School psych experts discussing the way the dream perfectly captures Ender’s anxiety about destroying his attackers completely and his ongoing desire to be forgiven for their deaths. Early in the book, something this heavy-handed would seem like “a cheap way to add sub-text.” By coming so late in the book, Card has bought our trust. Even so, there’s a risk to such a clear dream. The author risks throwing the reader out of the story just for a moment before they decide to believe that Ender’s brain delivered such nice sub-text to him by chance.
Having read the book, you know that the key lies on the next page. Here, again, Card hangs a flag on the dreams: “It was as if someone rode him in his sleep, forcing him to wander through his worst memories, to live in them again as if they were real.”
He basically comes right out and says, “These aren’t just dreams. Wait for it.”
When we do, the pay-off is there. The formics, who communicate instantly, of course rifle through Ender’s brain. It makes so much sense.
To do that, though, Card had to have already gained our trust by always following through earlier in the novel on the implicit promises in the narrative. Remember that first set of questions he set up for us on the first page? That was the opening move in a long negotiation to buy our trust. Trying to use this trick in a story without aliens like the formics wouldn’t work because you need their sheer alien-ness, to create the necessity for such communication, and their ability to connect directly, mind to mind. Even trying to do this earlier in the novel would not have worked because it would have meant asking the reader to believe actively that the dreams are plausible, and some readers, not yet fully invested in the story, might not be willing to suspend their disbelief. It’s a tricky balance but worth the cost in the end.
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