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

gateway.
    Did I have a story? By no means. I still didn’t even have a world. I set the map aside.
    Around that time, the TV news was full of stories about a couple in Layton, Utah, who had just given birth to twins conjoined at the top of their heads. It was a tricky operation to separate them, and the photos before they were separated were disturbingly alien. But, being a perverse sort of person, I tried to imagine what could be worse. Not more lifethreatening-simply worse to see. Worse to live through.
    I came up with the idea of two sisters who were born joined at the face. One sister was staring directly into her twin’s face; after separation, her face would be a blank mask, with no eyes, no real nose, and only a gap for a mouth. The other twin, though, was facing half away; after separation, while one eye was missing and one cheek was a ruin, her profile from the other side would look perfectly normal. Which sister suffered more, the one who would never see how hideous she was, would never look at others looking away from her? Or the one who, by turning her face just so, could catch a glimpse of how beautiful she and her sister could have been; and then, by staring at herself full in the face in the mirror, could see just how hideously deformed she was?
    I even tried writing a story about these sisters. The draft is lost, which is just as well-it was going nowhere.
    Around that time I discovered the writings of Mary Renault. When I read her book The King Must Die, in which the ancient Greek women have a separate, older religion which secretly rivals the public religion of the men, I realized that there mustn’t be merely two rival gods in the city I had drawn-the Hart and the god named God-there must be another tradition of worship. A women’s religion, and the god would be the Sweet Sisters, those two women who were born joined at the face. One of them was permanently staring inward, contemplating the inner secrets of the universe, breathing only the breath that her sister had already inhaled; while the other, seeing half in and half out, was able to see our world and
    communicate with her worshippers. However, at the time of my story whatever it would be-the two sisters had been forcibly separated, thereby making it impossible for either to see into the mind of God. The one was blind, remembering only the sight of the infinite; the other, with her single eye, could remember only the mortal world that constantly impinged on her vision.
    Who would have the power to separate these women? I thought at first that it must be the god named God, and that the Hart would eventually ally with them and rejoin them. But that would be a story about gods, and that wouldn’t be interesting even to me. So instead I knew it had to be a mortal who had somehow gained enough power to tame not only the Sweet Sisters, but also the Hart and the god named God.
    Did I have a story yet? No. I had a map of a fascinating city fascinating to me, at least) and a trio-temporarily a quartet-of gods.
    I began teaching a science fiction writing class at the University of Utah, and on the first day of class, when there were no stories to critique, I began a spur-of-themoment exercise designed simply to show that science fiction and fantasy ideas are ridiculously easy to come up with. I asked questions; they improvised answers; and out of the answers, we made stories. To my surprise, the idea was not just a fiveminute exercise-it became a fun, exciting session that took almost the whole period. I have since used the process in every class or workshop I’ve taught, and have put on a “Thousand Ideas in an Hour” session at almost every science fiction convention I’ve attended and every school I’ve visited. Not only is the process always entertaining, but also the results are always different and always workable as stories.
    To wit: At the very first session, I asked them to think of the “price of magic.” In a fantasy, if magic has no