By Donna Farley

Everyone has their own lists of books -- books they would take to a desert island, books they recall fondly from childhood, books that first made them want to be writers.  The game I'm playing in this article is just a little different.  

Much as I love Middle Earth, it could not have been engendered by any mind but that of a Roman Catholic Oxford philologist who lived through two world wars, so there wouldn’t be much use pretending it could ever be mine.  Instead, I’d like to choose contemporary writers, with lives just a little closer to mine.  And when I look at what their books have in common  (and maybe even what they have in common with my beloved Tolkien), it gives me a clearer picture of what I want to strive for in my own fiction.  Even if these books aren't yet on your personal list, or even in your preferred genre, I think if you try them you'll wish you had written them too.

Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. Anyone who's read the sequels to this novel can see how far Card has progressed as a writer since this early work. The disembodied voices that speak in the opening scenes of the first few chapters are confusing and annoying, like voiceover with nothing but a black screen, and no actors to distinguish which voice is which. Yet this book unquestionably deserved both the Hugo and Nebula it won.

Though it seems to have been the video game connection that won this book a following with the junior high crowd, the heart of the novel is found in sharp focus in the shower scene, where Bonzo Madrid has come to kill the smaller and apparently helpless Ender. The reader knows better than the arrogant Bonzo; we saw little Ender unknowingly kill a bully with his bare hands in chapter one. Yet the shower scene is no triumph. It closes with Ender in tears. "I didn't want to hurt him! Why didn't he just leave me alone!"

Card has set up the ultimate personal conflict for Ender--in his own nature, he is driven to win; but the very thing that makes him able to win is that it is also his nature to empathize completely with his enemy. This is what tears the reader's heart out as we follow Ender to the inevitable conclusion of the tale, in which the enemy he must fight is not just a macho bully, but the entire alien Bugger race, and the life at stake not just his own, but that of the whole human species--including his much-beloved sister.

Any one of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories can have the spot next to Ender on my bookshelf, and it is no coincidence that these too are award-winners. For an example I will take "The Weatherman," which forms the first part of the novel The Vor Game.

Bujold first loads her protagonist with burdens to bear: the son of no less a person than the prime minister of Barrayar, a militaristic interplanetary Empire, Miles is handicapped by dwarfism and brittle bones, the legacy of an assassination attempt on his parents while he was still in utero. His brilliance and personal audacity have nevertheless won him a commission; his first military assignment is the less-than-thrilling position of weatherman on an arctic training base.

When the megalomaniacal base commander orders some trainees to clean up a mutagenic chemical spill, they mutiny; on Barrayar, the horror and fear of mutation are deeply ingrained. The commander orders the trainees, at gunpoint, to strip in the sub-zero night, and offers them their clothes back only if they will obey. Miles realizes they will die rather than risk mutation, and knows only he can prevent a massacre that could be covered up as the suppression of a mutiny, for Imperial Security will certainly investigate the death of the Prime Minister's son. But he risks the career he so desperately craves, and possibly his life, by stripping off his own uniform to join the trainees.

I think it's no accident that the pivotal scenes in both these books have the protagonists naked. They stand without defenses, alone with nothing but the resources of their own characters, and their own consciences.

Such powerful key scenes are what make me wish I'd written a book. But such scenes can't be written in isolation. Carefully constructed threads of plot and character must lead up to them, like the threads of a spider web leading inevitably to its center.

Nor is it enough, for me at least, that the characters be put between a rock and a hard place and forced to act. They must act out of their character--and that character must be one that ultimately I will admire and want to emulate, even if (or especially if) they also have flaws. In other words, they've got to be a hero.

An old-fashioned attitude, perhaps, and it doubtless makes clear one reason why I am also so fond of Tolkien. But neither Tolkien, nor Bujold, nor Card makes the error of moralizing in their books: they just tell stories. Bujold's books are about honour, Card's about love. Lord of the Rings is about courage, which, Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis wrote "is the form taken by any virtue at the sticking point."

That's the kind of book I want to write. That's the kind of person I want to be. If I can develop something like Bujold's wit, if I can learn from Card's vivid scene-writing, if I can try to emulate Tolkien's love of language, these will all be means to an end -- to write stories that maybe, some day, will make someone else say, "I wish I had written that."