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W: Hello, everybody, this is Claire White with the evening show Real Talk. [3] Today our guest is Orson Scott Card. Orson, I’d like to talk first about your recent fantasy book, Enchantment. How did this story come into being? What attracted you to the story of "Sleeping Beauty"?
M: My film company had acquired the rights to an idea: Sleeping Beauty wakes up in Russia today. As with many such high-concept ideas, there really wasn’t much more to it than that. For me, the fascination was not so much with Sleeping Beauty waking up today or even with the fish-out-of-water scenario of a medieval woman in modern times. [1]I was interested in the call to heroism — the guy who wakes her thinks he’s kissing a princess, but instead he’s taking on a full-time and lifelong job.
W: What was the most challenging aspect of creating this character of Ivan, the hero of Enchantment?
M: The story required certain things: [2A] A reason for him to start a Russian but end up an American; [2BC] the ability to speak the language of the princess; enough athletic ability to get across the chasm to the princess; a reason to go back to Russia; some ability or abilities that would be useful in fighting the wicked witch. These requirements forced me to move him through an unusual life pattern. To get him from Russia to America, I made him part of the Jewish emigration in the 1970s. To give him Old Slavonic, I made his father a professor of ancient languages who talked shop at home. To get him back to Russia, I made him a grad student — and to prepare him to understand what was going on, 1 made him a student of ancient Slavic folklore. And I also made him a lifelong athlete. All these were required by the story, but in the process of making these things fit together into a coherent life with a believable family, I ended up falling in love with Ivan and both his parents — especially his mother. Ivan’s frustration was being misjudged by everyone; but what I admired about him was that no matter what he might wish, he kept coming down on the side of Doing the Right Thing. [2D] Not the dramatic battle between Good and Evil, but the quotidian battle between unwillingness and responsibility.
W: Let’s talk about Sleeping Beauty herself— Princess Katerina. How did you approach the creation of Katerina? Were there any character traits you were specifically trying to avoid?
M: I wanted to avoid the obvious: Making her anachronistically feminist or modern in some other way. The story only worked if she was a woman of her time. Nor did I want her to be passive, waiting to be rescued. Her people depended on her, and she took her duties seriously in an age when monarchs were not just political but also religious leaders. She had to be in every way the opposite of Baba Yaga — without being Susan Silverman from the Spenser novels.
W: Ivan’s relationship with his parents is a complex one and, although most people’s mothers aren’t talented good witches, the exchanges between son and parents ring very true. How much of your family life do you find creeping into your work?
M: Ivan’s parents were very different from mine, and largely unplanned. [4] What mattered to me was simply that they be good parents, in this era when people only seem to write about dysfunctional families — or erase the family entirely, treating their heroes as if they sprang like Minerva from the head of Jove. So Ivan’s parents had to be involved in his life without consuming him with their own ambitions; worried about him but willing to let him make his own choices ... to a point. How do you keep "good parents" from being boring? Well, in truth, the real problem is, how do you keep bad parents from being boring! I’ve seen the same bad parents in so many books and movies that I’m tired of them. In creating Ivan’s family, the "forced conversion" to Judaism was the biggest problem, because it was such a morally complicated thing to do and the level of sincerity in the conversion had to be believable and not utterly cynical. In solving that first dilemma I found the seeds of both parents’ relationships with Ivan. In truth, the secret to all characterization for me is expressible in two maxims: Every character is the hero of his own story, and you don’t write characters, you write relationships. In practice the first maxim means that you must let characters have their own purposes and agendas, not just do what the plot requires, and the second maxim means that nobody is the same person to everyone — who they are depends in large part on whom they’re with.