American Author Proposal

Arin Schwartz
Block A English
1/24/08

American Author Proposal: Orson Scott Card

The American author I have decided to propose to you is Orson Scott Card. He has written many books in many different genres, including fantasy and biblical novels, along with poetry and many plays and scripts. The main area of writing Card is famous for is his science fiction novels. There are different series’ with a large number of books in each, but all the series’ are connected somehow. His most famous works are Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow and Speaker for the Dead, which are all quite well known and are becoming increasingly used as a teaching tool in classrooms. Card’s birthplace was Washington (America) and he grew up in assorted states, the main ones including Utah, Arizona and California. When he is not writing, Card is teaching writing and literature at Southern Virginia University. He also served in a mission in Brazil in the early 1970’s, emphasizing his Christian beliefs which (thankfully) do not appear strongly in his science fiction novels.

Card as a writer is fascinating to me. There is one theme/topic I am growing increasingly interested in as I think more about his books. This topic is the depth in which Card explores the raw power of the human mind. He uses this to attempt explain the motivations behind every human’s actions. Card points out the sheer depth of the mind and makes his best guess at explaining it, but my favorite part about his writing, being the logical guy that I am, is the way it entices your own thoughts about such an intriguing subject such as psychology. It’s not technical psychology either. It’s emotional and rational psychology. It’s the very same stuff that I love to explore on my own with meditation, so it’s great to see someone who can provoke such thoughts and yet still entertain me in other ways.

Card has written countless books and played a very important role in the many genres he has added his work to. I however, plan to stay strictly in the science fiction section of his work, because it is the only section that interests me (Biblical novels… gross.). if all goes well, the very thing that draws me to Card’s writing is the subject that I will be able to write my ten page paper on. If this theme and explorative nature of writing style continues across multiple books of his, I could go twenty pages about this subject if I wanted to.

I do not have a definite plan for which of Card’s many books I will read yet. Since I like to finish things after I start them and I have already read Ender’s Game and there just happens to be a total of four books in that particular series, I may just read the next three and finish that series off. If I for some reason get wind that the Ender’s Shadow series is more appealing, I may just switch over and read the first three books of that series. However, because the themes in Card’s writing I love so much were present in Ender’s Game, reading the rest of that series will probably be my best bet if I am looking for a continuation of such themes, as they will have the same characters for the most part.

In closing, I’d like to say that I am looking forward to this project quite a lot. It gives me an excuse to actually sit down and read a few great books with no distractions. I believe Card’s novels will be quite entertaining, and that is a large reason why I chose him as well. I could not sit down and read three novels by someone who I thought was boring. I just couldn’t do it.