How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card Read Free Book Online Page A

bed, lay a sheet of paper atop a notebook, and begin to doodle a map while I listen to the Channel 2 news and then the Carson show.
    Only this time, I doodle a different kind of map. After all, this paper cries out for something special, and I’m tired of coastlines and continents. I trace a bend in a river, and instead of dots for cities, I begin drawing tiny squares and rectangles to represent buildings, with gaps marking the streets. Heavy lines denote the walls of a castle; more heavy lines show the city walls. And I put gates in the walls.
    A few nights later, the map is finished. Now it’s time for naming. I had put in a few religious sites; the gate that leads into the main temple area gets the name “God’s Gate.” The gate near the commercial area is named “Asses’ Gate” because that’s the beast of burden the merchants use. One riverside gate, leading to the main street through the city, is “King’s Gate”;
    another, near the animal stalls outside the city and leading directly to the Great Market, is “Grocers’ Gate.”
    Then the idea occurs to me that maybe when you enter at a particular gate, you get a certain kind of pass that limits you to certain areas and activities in the city inside the wall. If you come in at one gate, you find a completely different kind of city from the one you find when you enter at another. Come in as a pilgrim through God’s Gate, and you don’t leave the temple area. Come in as a grocer and you have the run of the market but can’t go near the trading floors.
    Knowing this, I crudely named the gate near the poor section of town, with hundreds of tiny houses, “Piss Gate,” because people who entered there only had a three-day pass allowing them to attempt to find work; if they remained after three days, they were imprisoned or killed or sold into slavery. A hopeless, desperate way to enter the city.
    But not the most hopeless way. For there was one gate that, in the process of drawing, I had accidently drawn with no gap between the two towers that guarded it. Even after slightly redrawing the towers, there was no gap between them. Unless I resorted to Liquid Paper, that entrance to the city was spoiled.
    Except that I believe, when it comes to storytelling-and making up maps of imaginary lands is a kind of storytelling-that mistakes are often the beginning of the best ideas. After all, a mistake wasn’t planned. It isn’t likely to be a cliché. All you have to do is think of a reason why the mistake isn’t a mistake at all, and you might have something fresh and wonderful, something to stimulate a story you never thought of quite that way before. So I thought-what if this gate has been permanently closed off? I drew houses right across both faces of the gate. That explained why there was no gap between the towers.
    Now, as I was naming all the gates, I had to wonder why this gate had been closed. And then I realized that this gate was closed because it had been the magical way into the city. A walled city spoke of medieval times; what could be more natural than to have this be the setting for a fantasy? The political powers in the city would naturally resent or fear the rival power of magicians; the gate would have been closed years ago. Only it wasn’t closed completely. You can still get through, if you can pay the right bribes, but you enter the city as a criminal, with no pass at all, and the city you find is a dark, dangerous, magical one where the rules of nature don’t work the way they used to.
    It happened that this closed gate was near a section of town where I had drawn a small shrine that, for reasons I cannot remember, I had already named “Hart’s Hope.” I decided that this magical gate had once been the main route into the city, back when the Hart was the god of this place, long before the god called God came to be worshipped in the temple in the southeast corner. So the worshippers of the old god, the Hart, would enter town through this