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Right, so, Orson Scott Card once gave a piece of writing advice: as soon as you notice that your story is trying to give someone a moral, try to undermine it or

Right, so, Orson Scott Card once gave a piece of writing advice: as soon as you notice that your story is trying to give someone a moral, try to undermine it or thwart it in some way. I think that's what you're seeing here (notwithstanding the series' overarching allegory on the book of Mormon and whatever attendant lessons exist there). Postscript: Hey, guys, some of you need to crank up the ostentatious "I hate ender's game!" knob a little louder. Some of us still are unaware that there exist people who dislike the book! Surely your links to a blog post which polarizes the matter in the light of your favorite philosophical or political movement will change everyone's opinion and fix this. :P

anatoly 13y ago
It's nice of you to point out that, coincidentally, the people you disagree with are the ones behaving ostentatiously on this thread. Here, let me chime in with another piece of Card's writing advice, as convincingly retold by Jo Walton: "My C shelves begin, controversially, with Orson Scott Card, who was one of my favourite authors for a long time but whom I can no longer read. I started reading him with Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason in the early 80s, and I stopped in 1997, so I have read absolutely everything up to then and nothing since. I stopped reading him because he said in his book on how to write that the best way to get readers engaged was to have appealing innocent characters and torture them, and after that I kept seeing that he was doing that and it kept jerking me out of the story."
- tel 13y ago
  That's a pretty great synopsis of what I remember about Ender's Game.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  Another word for jerking around the audience (readers) though manipulating characters is drama. We still watch Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones, right?
  - johnchristopher 13y ago
    After reading that slate article about how the writers brain-stormed the ending to fit their audience and get the "best" emotions out of them instead of following up on characters' development I decided not to watch any tv shows for a while. edit: I thought that breaking bad was awesome but reading it being reduced as "drama" make me realize it was mainly drama in specific setting :(
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  I can't read him anymore because it's too obvious what the plot is going to be: a misunderstood but fundamentally holy Hero Dude goes off into the wilderness or something to found a new city where his disciples can live in peace the way God intended <tm>. So: the Ender's Game series, the Alvin Maker series, the Homecoming series, Lovelock, Wyrms, Pastwatch, Treason, and on some level, most of the biblio-historical-fiction series. Any major Card works I'm missing? I'll give partial credit to _Songmaster_, and maybe even _Enchanted_.

anatoly 13y ago

It's nice of you to point out that, coincidentally, the people you disagree with are the ones behaving ostentatiously on this thread. Here, let me chime in with another piece of Card's writing advice, as convincingly retold by Jo Walton: "My C shelves begin, controversially, with Orson Scott Card, who was one of my favourite authors for a long time but whom I can no longer read. I started reading him with Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason in the early 80s, and I stopped in 1997, so I have read absolutely everything up to then and nothing since. I stopped reading him because he said in his book on how to write that the best way to get readers engaged was to have appealing innocent characters and torture them, and after that I kept seeing that he was doing that and it kept jerking me out of the story."

tel 13y ago
That's a pretty great synopsis of what I remember about Ender's Game.
humanrebar 13y ago
Another word for jerking around the audience (readers) though manipulating characters is drama. We still watch Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones, right?
- johnchristopher 13y ago
  After reading that slate article about how the writers brain-stormed the ending to fit their audience and get the "best" emotions out of them instead of following up on characters' development I decided not to watch any tv shows for a while. edit: I thought that breaking bad was awesome but reading it being reduced as "drama" make me realize it was mainly drama in specific setting :(
fennecfoxen 13y ago
I can't read him anymore because it's too obvious what the plot is going to be: a misunderstood but fundamentally holy Hero Dude goes off into the wilderness or something to found a new city where his disciples can live in peace the way God intended <tm>. So: the Ender's Game series, the Alvin Maker series, the Homecoming series, Lovelock, Wyrms, Pastwatch, Treason, and on some level, most of the biblio-historical-fiction series. Any major Card works I'm missing? I'll give partial credit to _Songmaster_, and maybe even _Enchanted_.