Orson Scott Card’s Writing Process

Orson Scott Card has written 61 books, including the best-selling Ender’s Game and won this year’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for his outstanding contributions to teen literature. An article in the School Library Journal mentions how he manages such tremendous output.

Two full-time assistants help Card free up time for his many activities. So does the speed with which he composes his books. “When I write, I’m very, very fast,” he says. Total typing time, as opposed to thinking time, averages five weeks per novel. “I write a story as if I were telling it to a group of people whose interest I have to hold. So I don’t have time when I’m writing to indulge myself in description or lengthy asides. But the real work, the foundational work, the structural work, the skeleton of the story—that comes before I ever set words on a piece of paper. The thinking time can be years. Very rarely have I gone from idea to finished work very quickly.”

As the writing years go by, I’m finding that I spend more time in that thinking stage, too. The novel I’m currently working on started as a short story. Then I started to think of logical events that would follow that story and I began writing it as a novel. The novel was moving along pretty well until real life events intruded, so I put it on hold for a while.

And while it has been on hold, I’ve continued to have some amazing ideas for it. Ideas that will intensify the conflict and deepen the characters. Ideas that I certainly never would have thought of if I had continued working on it and written straight through to the end. It makes me think that I might need more thinking time on my stories. Maybe I’m rushing into the writing too quickly and not allowing enough time for my subconcious to come up with unique plot twists and character conflicts.

So for now, I’m taking notes as my brain comes up with ideas and I have a feeling this story will be a lot better because of increased thinking time.

How much thinking time do you allow on your stories?

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