Invasive Procedures (48 page)

“Monica will be sad she missed you.”

“Yes, tell her that we all said hello. All of us. There were a few of us involved, you know. Not just me.”

“I’ll tell her, yes.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re leaving?” said Wyatt, looking crestfallen.

Frank squatted to his level. “Yeah, I’ve got to get going. It was good to see you, though.”

“When are you coming back?”

Frank stole a glance to Victor. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m a busy guy these days.”

Wyatt looked over Frank’s shoulder and brightened. “Mom’s home.”

Frank turned around to see Monica’s SUV pull into the driveway beside his rental car. Why oh why hadn’t he called first?

She got out and put her sunglasses on top of her head, holding her hair back.

“Mom, look who’s here!”

“I can see that,” she said. “Hello, Frank.”

“Hello.” He didn’t know if he should go to her or wait there on the porch. What he wanted to do was dash to his car and peel out of the driveway.

She reached into the SUV and came out with a sack of groceries. “Victor, there are a few more bags in the back. Do you mind?”

Wyatt’s father hopped to it. He grabbed the sacks, then disappeared back into the house.

Monica paused at the porch. “Did Victor not invite you inside?”

“No, he did,” said Frank. “I told him I had to get going. I only came by to say hello.”

She looked disappointed. “Oh. You sure you don’t want to come in?”

“No, I don’t want to intrude. I was just in the neighborhood.” He had forgotten how striking her eyes were.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” she said. Before Frank could object, she passed Wyatt the sack of groceries. “Take that inside, will you, squirt?”

“See you, Frank,” said Wyatt, hefting the sack and leaving Frank and Monica alone on the porch. They walked toward the driveway.

“I’m glad you came by,” she said.

“I should have called first.”

“You don’t have to. Come by whenever.”

“That’s nice of you. Thank you.”

“Wyatt would want to see you.”

“Yeah. I would like that.”

They stood by his car. “You look good,” she said. “I didn’t see you after everything. I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Same. I was glad to hear you both checked out okay. You know, virus free.”

“Yes, that was a relief. And you as well.”

“Right. No more virus.”

She sighed. “Listen, about Victor. This whole thing really shook him up. The thought of losing Wyatt . . . he hasn’t stopped spending time with him since we got back. It’s more time than he’s
ever
spent with him, actually. He even insisted on sleeping here a few days so he can put Wyatt to bed and get up before he wakes.”

“That’s great. A boy needs his father.”

“I just didn’t want you to think that he and I, you know . . .” She searched for the word. “We’re not getting back together or anything. I mean, not that you care, but he has his girlfriend at his house.”

“Oh. Well, that’s great that he wants to spend time with Wyatt.”

“Yes, I only hope it lasts.”

“Me too.”

“But that doesn’t mean that Wyatt won’t want to see you, of course. He would. That is, if you’re not leaving town.”

“No, I’ll be here now,” he said.

“Permanently?”

“For now, anyway.”

She nodded. “Good. So we’ll see you again, then.”

“Yes.” He got his keys out of his pocket and fiddled with them until he found the one he needed. When he looked up at her again she was smiling, not a neighborly, polite smile but an I-enjoy-your-company smile. Or at least that’s what he hoped.

“Good-bye,” he said.

“For now,” she said.

He unlocked the door and got inside. She watched him pull out and away, waving twice before his car disappeared down the hill, heading back into Los Angeles.

by Orson Scott Card

Back in 1976, I was working as a staff editor at
The Ensign
magazine in Salt Lake City, where fellow editors Jay Parry and Lane Johnson and I ate lunch together and talked through our ideas for science fiction stories. I had shown them my short story “Ender’s Game,” which I had recently revised and sent off to Ben Bova at
Analog
, and we were all excited by the possibilities that science fiction offered to us as writers.

Then came the day that I came to work brandishing Ben Bova’s response to my second pass at “Ender’s Game”—a check for $300. Suddenly it wasn’t just a dream—one of us had actually
sold
a story. Everything seemed possible. And the ideas we talked about began to seem like they might lead somewhere in the real world.

It was in those conversations that the story ideas emerged that became my second novel,
A Planet Called Treason
, and many of my early short stories—including my collaboration with Jay Parry, “In the Doghouse,” and a few stories that have never been published.

We all talked to one another as if we knew something about professional writing. All we
really
knew was how to get excited about each other’s ideas, giving each other the courage to sit down and write.

Since I was the one who had sold a story, though, the burden was on me to produce. The next story I sent to
Analog
was sent back with Ben’s advice that what I had was the beginning of a story, and now I needed to
finish it. I was stunned—after all, I sent it to him because I thought I
had
ended it. But I was not so stupid that I couldn’t listen to good advice, and I found more things to do with what eventually became “Follower.”

Ironically, several people told me that they guessed the ending right from the start. I thought that was crazy, since I hadn’t even known the ending when I wrote the beginning of the story; later, though, I realized they were right: when I was flailing about for an ending, I hit upon one of the most obvious ways to take the story and used it. So of course it was predictable; I had taken it from page 5 of volume I of my Mental Cliché Shelf.

(And no, I won’t send you a copy of that collection. You have to build your own. In fact, you already have.)

Ben bought the revised version of “Follower.” Thus encouraged, I settled down to work on yet another idea I had batted around with Jay and Lane at those lunchtime writing workshops. This was the era when vital-organ transplants were still news, and I did a fairly standard paranoid what-if: What if you got an organ transplant you didn’t want, and the implanted organ started taking over your body?

Once again, Ben Bova rejected my first version. It wasn’t enough to have something horrible happen. He asked some pertinent questions:
Why
does the heart take over the hero’s body? Whose heart was it? What happens because he was taken over? Why was the hero chosen to receive this heart? Who did the transplanting?

Reading over this list, one can only wonder what in the world was in the story I originally submitted. The answer is: It was a very short, icky little story that I thought of, in my delusional new-writer state, as being “Poe-ish.” Sort of a modern “Tell-Tale Heart.” Except that even Poe made sure we knew why the hero would hear the thumping of the dead heart. I had given the reader nothing.

Following Ben’s lead, I came up with answers to those questions, and the result was my third sale, “Malpractice.”

But by now it should be obvious that I was
not
working alone. My ideas were all being tried out on two bright and talented friends, whose encouragement showed me which stories were most likely to be worth pursuing. And then I had an editor who, detecting more promise in my work than others saw, helped guide me into discovering what it takes to make an idea into a story.

Fiction writers do not work alone. Even those who hole up in an attic or take their laptop to the park and work on stories they have never discussed with a soul are still drawing from the experience of reading other stories and from the ideas other people gave them about which stories matter enough to be worth telling.

Storytelling is a communitarian act: Every story creates a community, and arises under the influence of the communities the writer has been part of. (This is the great but obvious “insight” that remains the only useful concept to emerge from the blather of Deconstructionism.) “Malpractice” was most definitely my story—every word was mine, every story decision was my own. And yet it reflects the responses of three collaborators who listened and read and made suggestions.

Skip nearly thirty years, and guess what—I’m still a supplicant, a novice writer trying to break in. Oh, sure, I have fifty-plus books published, but that’s yesterday’s news. Now I’m trying to break into the film industry in Los Angeles. I have the help of a brilliantly talented young writer, actor, and comic named Aaron Johnston, who is running the LA office of Taleswapper (the film company I formed with director Peter Johnson).

On the theory that we shouldn’t wait for me to learn how to write successful screenplays, we decided that Aaron should look over my short stories and see if there were any he’d be interested in adapting as screenplays. The plan was that we would pay him scab-labor wages as an advance against the
real
money he’d make when somebody funded the development of the picture.

So Aaron pored over my published story collections and chose a couple of projects—a story called “Fat Farm” and one of my oldest ones, “Malpractice.” For various reasons—not least of them the likely budget of the resulting film—we settled on “Malpractice” as the starting point.

The short story contained enough plot to get us through about twenty minutes of film. Plus, the climax of “Malpractice” is still simply finding out what’s happening, which is pretty much where a movie thriller really gets moving. Obviously the story would have to grow considerably and become much more intense.

Thus Aaron and I began sessions reminiscent of what I used to do with Lane and Jay. The danger was that because I was an established writer (of fiction, not screenplays), Aaron would take my ideas as dicta
that had to be followed. The result would have been a story that I believed in and he didn’t—which would guarantee that he could not write it well.

Fortunately, Aaron was too smart and too honest to let anybody else force their ideas on him. Despite the difference in our ages (he was young enough to be my son) and whatever authority my list of publications might give me, Aaron took nothing I said as a final answer. Instead, he responded to ideas with more ideas, and when I brought up problems with the story as it was developing, he thought of solutions faster than I could. (In
Storytelling: The Videogame
, as with all other videogames, youth has its advantages.)

The result was a very good screenplay, entirely of Aaron’s writing, but thick with story ideas that came from both of us. It had been a true collaboration. It had also been great fun for me, and not just because Aaron was doing all the
hard
work.

I liked the result so well, in fact, that I pitched the screenplay to my editor at Tor Books, Beth Meacham, as a collaborative novel based on Aaron’s screenplay based on our collaborative conversations based on my short story. She read the screenplay and took our bet.

(That’s what publishers do, of course—they bet thousands of dollars that the writer can actually produce a novel, and many thousands more that readers will actually buy it. And when they lose that bet, I don’t see many writers taking up collections to make up their losses. That’s why I don’t understand the writers who get angry or resentful when publishers reject their manuscripts. It’s the publishers’ money, and so the publishers get to decide which horse to bet on in the race. If you’re a writer and nobody bets on your manuscript, the answer isn’t to whine and complain, or even to start your own race; the answer is to get another horse—to write another book or story. And another. And another, until somebody’s willing to bet on one of them.)

Once again Aaron and I plunged into outlining the novel version—which had to be even longer and more complicated than the screenplay. Movies have to communicate instantly with their audience, which means that there’s a sort of thinness required in the writing—even of the most arty and “dense” movies. It’s simply a thinner medium. There’s not as much time to explain things. And you can’t get inside the characters’ heads.

This time around, though, Aaron and I had not only each other and
the normal list of friends and relatives we involve in our creative processes, we also had Beth Meacham. Inevitably, once the screenplay existed, Aaron and I became inadvertently trapped inside the decisions we had made for that version of the story. Beth helped us find our way outside, to broaden the novel and make it better. The things we learned from working with her on that project also helped me as I worked on my solo thriller,
Empire
—though that was also a collaboration.

Heck, it’s all collaboration, to one degree or another.

It’s a great thing
to
write a solo novel, where I get to make all the decisions and mine is the only name on the cover.

But it’s also a great thing to collaborate. That’s how I began, after all, in the collaborative world of the theatre. When I was a playwright, the scripts I wrote were never more than the
plans
for plays. I couldn’t know what I’d written until actors stood up and said the lines and did the actions. Working with Aaron was a return to those days—and to the days in the cafeteria at 50 East North Temple Street in Salt Lake City, where Jay and Lane and I batted ideas around like badminton birdies.

We’re already at work on a collaborative thriller based on my short story “Fat Farm.”

And Aaron is well along on his first solo novel. Because that’s where this sort of thing leads. Some hotshot young genius gets a taste for fiction writing, and he wants to turn it into a career. The only thing I ask of him is that he wait at least five years before his books surpass mine on the bestseller lists. It’s what they called, in the Vietnam War era, a “decent interval.”

—
Lexington, Virginia, February 2007