Speaker for the Dead Read Free Page B

Maker novels, for instance, the characters of Little Peggy and Arthur Stuart weren't in any of my outlines, and yet they are now at the heart of that story.   And in Speaker for the Dead, the character of Jane wasn't in any of the outlines I made.   Oh, yes, I gave him a computer connection through the jewel in his ear, but I didn't know it was a person. Jane just grew because it was so fun to write her relationship with Ender.   She helped bring him to life (he could so easily have been a stodgy, dull adult), and in the process came to life herself.   By the time I was done with Speaker for the Dead, Jane was one of the most important characters in it, and much of the third book, Xenocide , centers around her.
    Oh yes.   The third book. I had never planned to write a third book.   In fact, I really hadn't planned to write a first book-- Speaker was originally supposed to be a solo .   But just as I was writing the last few chapters of Speaker, Barbara Bova called and said she had sold the Ender trilogy to an English publisher.
    "The Ender trilogy ," I asked.   "Barbara, there are only two."
    Naturally, she was a bit flummoxed.   Of course she could always go back and renegotiate for only two books.   But first, couldn't I think a little bit and see if perhaps I might come up with a third story that I wanted to write?
    At that moment I knew exactly the story I wanted to tell.   It had nothing to do with Ender Wiggin or any of the characters in Speaker for the Dead.   Rather it was an ancient project from early in my career, one that Jim Frenkel, then at Dell, had rejected because I just wasn't   mature enough, as a writer, to handle a project so difficult.   Having solved the problems of Speaker for the Dead, though, I felt ready to tackle anything.   It had been years since I had even thought about that story, then called Philotes, yet wasn't it possible that by putting Ender Wiggin into it, I might be able to bring it to life the way Speaker had come to life because of his presence? I might fail, of course, but why not try?
    Besides--and here you are about to learn something truly vile about me--having a third book would mean that I didn't have to figure out some way to resolve the two loose threads that I knew would be dangling at the end of Speaker.   What happens to the hive queen?   And what happens to the fleet that Starways Congress sends?
    By agreeing to do a third Ender book I could leave those questions for the sequel, and since I am a shamefully lazy man, I jumped at the chance. I jumped too soon--the book was every bit as difficult as Jim Frenkel had told me it would be, and it took years to get it right--and even then it is far and away the talkiest, most philosophical of my novels, which is just what the original outline of Philotes had required.   Over the years the title of the third book changed, from Ender's Children to Xenocide, and it also grew until it became two books, so that even Xenocide doesn't finish the story (though the next one will, I swear it!).
    And, like Speaker for the Dead before it, Xenocide was the hardest book I'd ever written up to then.   You see, the work of a storyteller doesn't get any easier the more experience we get, because once we've learned how to do something, we can't get excited about doing exactly the same thing again--or at least most of us can't.   We keep wanting to reach for the story that is too hard for us to tell--and then make ourselves learn how to tell it.   If we succeed, then maybe we can write better and better books, or at least more challenging ones, or at the very least we won't bore ourselves.
    The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I'm just plain not talented or skilled enough to write.   That's the dilemma every storyteller faces.   It is painful to fail.   But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to