Failure and Tension

[Sanderling]

I just finished reading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Last week I finished Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce. I came away feeling eih about both.

I was interested to find that the reason I felt eih about both was the same: the characters never failed; or at least, not enough to really matter to the story. The failure was mostly in the background. Instead of the failure being a pivotal plot point, it was more along the lines of a single sentence or two mentioning the failure and subsequent practice to get better, prior to the next plot point. Which the character attacks, perhaps has a setback, but ultimately succeeds with. Ender never once loses a battle, for instance (or at least, not one that's described in detail; I can't recall if any losses were mentioned in passing).

We like to see our protagonist succeed of course, but success without failure is boring; there’s no tension. When the character is faced with a challenge, we’re not concerned about whether or not they’ll make it through, because we know from the outset that they will. There’s no flipping pages to find out what happens next, because we know what happens next: the character succeeds. I would actually have described the protagonists of these books, and especially Ender, as slightly Mary Sue-ish just because they're so good at (or quickly become good at) everything.

(Incidentally, I found this for the most part true of the only other Tamora Pierce book I've read, too, Alanna: The First Adventure. The only other Orson Scott Card book I've read has been Pathfinder, a while ago, and while I still think the protagonist was generally pretty successful at stuff, I remember Rigg struggling more than Ender did; or at least not being so awesome at everything.)

What I find interesting, though, is what a great following these two books have. Ender's Game won both the Hugo and Nebula, for instance, and both have many fans. We're told time and again to avoid Mary Sue characters, to make sure your characters aren't awesome at everything, because readers will find that boring... but clearly there can be exceptions to the rule. So having identified these exceptions... what makes them exceptions?

[dios4vida]

I think a lot of this is the "if it works, it works" type situation we all hate and love.

Ender's Game was the first sci-fi book I ever read, which is probably why I liked it as much as I did. It was something so different from anything I'd ever read before, it was all novel. (Looking back now, not so much, to be honest.) I never really connected with Ender, but I was captivated by the Battle School and the situation enough that it carried me through the book. I much prefer the parallel novel Ender's Shadow because it's the story of Bean, who struggles and fights for his position and respect while always being in the shadow of Ender.

I really can't explain why Ender's Game is as huge as it is. I enjoyed it and I have a copy on my bookshelf (which says a lot because I only keep books I love) but I wouldn't say it's even close to my top ten list. If I had to speculate, I'd say the premise is what makes Ender's Game work. The moral difficulties of the Battle School and the fight against the buggers is what the story is really about. Ender and the others are just the characters needed so that the situation can be explored.

If Ender's Game came up for publication today, I honestly don't know if it would get picked up. Speculative fiction readers are much pickier today than they were back then. It worked back then because it really was novel, but now I think sci-fi fans want more than just an interesting world and moral dilemma to follow. We need characters more now than we did back then.

But then again, people are still reading it, so maybe I'm just blowing steam here.

I know that MattLarkin's a fan of Ender, I'll be interested to hear what we has to say about this.

That's my two cents, for what they're worth.

[Hillsy]

(Disclaimer: I've not read Ender's Game so I can't argu that specifically but.....)

I'm going to respectfully disagree here. 99% of the time the reader accepts the good guy will win and the bad guy will fail before they've opened the book. I'd say the problem isn't the ratio of failure to success, but how the character fails or succeeds.
Straight off the bat I can think of 2 examples.

One Is Joe Calzaghe, Welsh boxer. Never lost a professional fight. 46 wins, 32 Knock Outs. No one will say his lack of failure dampened the excitment of his career, because although he always triumphed, the struggle, the battle, was important, not the outcome. People don't talk about the times he won in the first round, but the times he might have lost, or beat opponents he was expected to be beaten by.
Secondly is Starwars VI: New Hope. Notice, Luke never loses. He suffers losses, yes (His Aunt & Uncle, Obi-Wan, Porkins), but they all happen off screen and utterly out of his control. The reason we don't mind is because his successes all come in circumstances we agree Luke has a chance of both winning and failing. Is essence, he picks his fights well.

The reverse is also true: inevitable and constant failure is also boring. Joe Abercrombie's "The Heroes" is wonderfully written with staggeringly awesome characterisation. But because of Abercrombie's style, we assume it will be filled with failure and loss for almost everyone involved, and any success will be shallow or bittersweet. It really suffered because of it, for me.

Plots need awesome characters sometimes, or they can't realistically overcome equally awesome obstacles (NB: Frodo is a brilliant example of this. He only has one awesome trait: determination. He doesn't overcome any awesome obstacles, but the entire ordeal he must endure is awesome in its own right - and therefore we aren't surprised he makes it to mount Dhoom). And at the same time failure can be as cliche'd as anything else.

If it was all about the tension of possible failure, no one would read. After all, the good guy is always going to win through in the end.

[dios4vida]

No one will say his lack of failure dampened the excitment of his career, because although he always triumphed, the struggle, the battle, was important, not the outcome. People don't talk about the times he won in the first round, but the times he might have lost, or beat opponents he was expected to be beaten by.

This is a really good point, but don't you feel at least a little resignation (for lack of a better word) after a little while? "Oh look, another dilemma. Of course he's gonna make it work, okay then." I find myself doing this every now and then.

But I think the main problem with Ender's Game isn't that Ender always wins his battles - it's that winning doesn't cost him anything. He doesn't come away with black eyes and busted jaws and broken ribs like a boxer would. Ender just always won. He rarely had to even sacrifice troops to do it. Sure, he was a naturally brilliant commander, and that's the point, but victory without sacrifice feels shallow. Yay, they won, but what are the consequences?

I'm not sure if this is just me, but I use that as a mantra for ending any of my novels - large victories require large sacrifices. Nothing is free. And sure, I love a good happy ending. (I actually really hate sad endings.) But even the happiest endings, like LOTR, has sacrifice. Thousands of Men died. Boromir died. Frodo lost his finger and was never able to emotionally heal from his exposure to the Ring. But it was a happy ending, Sauron was defeated and the world of Men had their King. All's good - but it wasn't free.

That's my issue with Ender's Game and other books like this (I haven't read the other one mentioned above). Winning isn't the problem, winning all the time isn't even the problem, it's winning when winning is nothing but sunshine and roses and claps on the back.

[Hillsy]

But I think the main problem with Ender's Game isn't that Ender always wins his battles - it's that winning doesn't cost him anything.

Exactly my point. Win every time, suceed everytime, but the tension and gripping part is in the how that success is achieved.

I've not read Ender's Game (I keep meaning to, then I read its MG/YA and I think I'll skip it. Then someone says its amazing and brilliant and I'll stick it on my "to-read" list, then I read its MG/YA......and so on) so I don't know the specifics, but the point I was trying to make was that "failure" isn't prerequisite for a good, tense plot. It's about the How of it all - and yes, costs go in there, as does character evolution, as does style and awesomeness - it is, in fact, the plot in its entirity.

I was also trying to make the similar argument that failure and loss can be just as dull and boring: "Oh look, she's just professed her love for him infront of the big baddie and now she's going away for a week. Of course the Big Baddie is going to kill him to make an example." It's just as common in certain types of books.

I think largely though me and you agree....

[dios4vida]

I think largely though me and you agree....

Yup, sounds like it. It's like me and my husband - we go round and round for 10 minutes before we realize we're thinking the same thing, just saying it different ways.

[Sanderling]

No one will say his lack of failure dampened the excitment of his career, because although he always triumphed, the struggle, the battle, was important, not the outcome. People don't talk about the times he won in the first round, but the times he might have lost, or beat opponents he was expected to be beaten by.

This is a really good point, but don't you feel at least a little resignation (for lack of a better word) after a little while? "Oh look, another dilemma. Of course he's gonna make it work, okay then." I find myself doing this every now and then.

I definitely found myself doing this, too. Also, very few competitors are ever truly unbeaten. Take the NFL for instance (the one pro sport I know anything about): how many teams have there been since the league merged who've gone the entire season completely unbeaten? Just two: '72 Dolphins and '07 Patriots. There have been many, many who have been awesome powerhouses, huge offensive juggernauts, but virtually every one suffers defeat now and then. You tune in on Sunday pretty confident that your team's going to pull out a win, but you know there's always the risk that they won't.

To pull in a Star Wars comparison (and I admit it's been a while since I've watched these movies), in the scene where Annakin and Obi-wan first fight Dooku, Annakin looses a hand and essentially fails. (The only reason he survives is 'cause Yoda steps in to save them both.) Or, in one of the originals, Leia comes in to free Han from carbonite and does so, but both are captured before they can escape.

Frodo himself fails: he fights the spider, and he loses. In fact, he fails at the most crucial moment: he reaches the mountain, and ultimately can't throw the ring in.

I'm going to respectfully disagree here. 99% of the time the reader accepts the good guy will win and the bad guy will fail before they've opened the book. I'd say the problem isn't the ratio of failure to success, but how the character fails or succeeds.

This is true. But I think it's different to acknowledge that in the end the protagonist will prevail than it is to watch the character struggle and occasionally fail on their way to get there. I'm not saying Ender should have lost every battle. But he should have lost one or two and be forced to learn from them. For instance, the first time, perhaps, he loses when Stilson beats him up; therefore when Bonzo beats him up, he wins (this wouldn't work as far as Graff et al assessing him of course, but from the perspective of Ender's story, I would've found this more satisfying).

But I think the main problem with Ender's Game isn't that Ender always wins his battles - it's that winning doesn't cost him anything. He doesn't come away with black eyes and busted jaws and broken ribs like a boxer would. Ender just always won. He rarely had to even sacrifice troops to do it. Sure, he was a naturally brilliant commander, and that's the point, but victory without sacrifice feels shallow. Yay, they won, but what are the consequences?

I hadn't really thought about that, but you're totally right, Brenda. On the other hand, I might argue it constitutes a subset of failure. It's okay for the protagonist to always win as long as there are consequences or casualties. When you're reading the book, sure you expect that they'll always win their conflicts, but you never know if everyone/everything is going to make it through to see the victory. Eg. The Fellowship wins against the Orcs, but Boromir dies in doing so. They failed to keep him alive even though their ultimate goal was achieved. Doesn't always have to be deaths, of course - losses of possessions, losses of goals, etc, would also constitute failures.

I was also trying to make the similar argument that failure and loss can be just as dull and boring: "Oh look, she's just professed her love for him infront of the big baddie and now she's going away for a week. Of course the Big Baddie is going to kill him to make an example." It's just as common in certain types of books.

I must not be reading those certain types of books. But yes, I would agree that constant failure would be just as boring as constant success. I think the problem is the constancy - if you already know how the conflict is going to resolve, there's no tension in reading it.

I wouldn't call Ender's Game YA/MG really, except for the age of the protagonist(s). I think the language and pacing are more like adult books I've read than YA. I think Card wrote it with an adult target audience.

[Sommer Leigh]

I have read Ender's Game and I'm one of it's big fans. I think Ender's Game is brilliant and while yes it's sort of MG/YA, I've also found it shelved in with SF/Fantasy and not with MG/YA. It lacks a lot of the cornerstones of MG/YA audiences, even though all the characters are young. It really reads more like an adult's political/scientific/war intrigue story that happens to have young people as the main characters.

I'm going to disagree with you about Ender's conflict and his inability to lose. Here's what I took from the book:

Yes, he wins all the battles, but that is not the primary conflict of the story. The conflict is mostly internal, primarily with his ability to make human connections that actually matter. From the very beginning it is made clear that Ender is special - he's specially amongst the very special in his world. He's brilliant to the point that the entire military is hedging its bets on this one boy. If he wasn't expected to succeed in battle, the world wouldn't pin its future entirely on him. I don't think his ability to strategize brilliantly was ever in question.

His conflict comes from being marginalized as the third child of a family - the unwanted child, the illegal number. Even though his parents were given permission to have him, in any other family he'd never have been born and he's reminded of this his whole childhood. His parents, teachers, other children, and commanders keep him at arms length. It doesn't matter that he's smarter and maybe even braver than the other kids, he's isolated from them entirely. His brother's torment on top of that strips him early of his ability to connect to the world as a human being.

Battle school continues this stripping process until he's the soldier they are looking for, which is fine, but by this point his external conflicts with others and with the system have become internal monsters which threaten to unmake him as a person, tipping him either one way into a robotic soldier or the other way into despair and unable to continue fighting. This internal conflict plays out amongst his relationships with the squads who target him and the squad members who are willing to die for him.

The same conflict plays out in his sister and brother too, but to a different degree. We see these children acting in ways that are not childlike, where children are bred through specific family blood lines to be smarter, more adult. They are raised at arms lengths to be less needy and less emotional. We end up with all these characters who are smarter than their adult counterparts, but struggle with finding a certain humanity in themselves to balance out the power they've been given. In some of the characters, they find it, and in others, they never do.

The battle strategies themselves are worth looking at - Ender has no problem early on sacrificing teammates for the whole even though, technically, the weapons don't cause lasting damage. The strategy of taking out their legs on purpose to use as shields or when he straps a wall of team members in front of the rest to use as human body shields is pretty gruesome when you think about it. These strategies are supposed to teach the kids to win in battle. His struggle to balance the military genius with the little boy shows the development of these strategies throughout the book and through each stage of the war.

I don't think anyone really doubted he'd do as well as he did, but we're supposed to worry about how he'll turn out in the end. How much of our beloved character will be left when its all over? How will he battle the lonliness and the need for comfort little boys experience? Will he turn out to be a killing machine or will he be able to have a real life, fall in love, make honest to goodness friends? Is everything that Ender loses worth what they gain in the end? How important, really, is winning when the nature of being human is at stake?

I think these conflicts are what make Ender's Game and as you see in the end, not everyone wins at these very human conflicts. Certainly not Ender.

[Sanderling]

I don't think anyone really doubted he'd do as well as he did, but we're supposed to worry about how he'll turn out in the end. How much of our beloved character will be left when its all over? How will he battle the lonliness and the need for comfort little boys experience? Will he turn out to be a killing machine or will he be able to have a real life, fall in love, make honest to goodness friends? Is everything that Ender loses worth what they gain in the end? How important, really, is winning when the nature of being human is at stake?

I think these conflicts are what make Ender's Game and as you see in the end, not everyone wins at these very human conflicts. Certainly not Ender.

Okay, I agree with you there, Sommer. It's pretty clear, with the whole lake scene, for instance, that it's character struggle driving it. So maybe the trouble is the reader (me ) looking more for plot-based tension than character-based tension? I have to admit that I found Ender's internal struggles a little more annoying than tense, but maybe it was because I could never really connect with him as a character, I never really liked him the way I like the protagonists in some of my favourite books. In thinking about it he did have some failures of character from time to time, but I wonder if maybe I overlooked those because I wasn't that attached to the character, and I was therefore reading the book for the plot?

[dios4vida]

I don't think anyone really doubted he'd do as well as he did, but we're supposed to worry about how he'll turn out in the end. How much of our beloved character will be left when its all over? How will he battle the lonliness and the need for comfort little boys experience? Will he turn out to be a killing machine or will he be able to have a real life, fall in love, make honest to goodness friends? Is everything that Ender loses worth what they gain in the end? How important, really, is winning when the nature of being human is at stake?

I think these conflicts are what make Ender's Game and as you see in the end, not everyone wins at these very human conflicts. Certainly not Ender.

Okay, I agree with you there, Sommer. It's pretty clear, with the whole lake scene, for instance, that it's character struggle driving it. So maybe the trouble is the reader (me ) looking more for plot-based tension than character-based tension? I have to admit that I found Ender's internal struggles a little more annoying than tense, but maybe it was because I could never really connect with him as a character, I never really liked him the way I like the protagonists in some of my favourite books. In thinking about it he did have some failures of character from time to time, but I wonder if maybe I overlooked those because I wasn't that attached to the character, and I was therefore reading the book for the plot?

Sommer, you have brilliant points (as usual). I think that's exactly what Card was going for, along with the moral dilemma of the entire bugger war.

However, I have to 'ditto' Sanderling. I never really fell in love with Ender, so his character struggles weren't something I paid a lot of attention to. I think that since we never connected with Ender, we missed out on a lot of the book's intended tension and emotional pull.

With that said, though, I still have a soft spot for Ender's Game. I have gotten rid of a lot of books from my bookshelves over the years, but Ender's Game has always had a spot there. So even though it didn't strike me in that way, there was still something there enough to make me hold onto that book.

[HillaryJ]

I'd like to add one more item to this discussion and, if it's already been mentioned I apologize.

With tension and conflict come The Stakes. The prize or the loss.

1) What's important to the character?
2) How important is it, or what will happen if the character doesn't win/acquire/achieve it?
3) Do you, as a reader, identify with those stakes?

A character could be standing in the middle of a raging battle (a large and obvious conflict), but if he didn't care about surviving and didn't have anyone or anything to get home to or protect, there would be no tension because nothing would be at stake. Similarly, if you as the reader hadn't yet connected with the character, you likely wouldn't care whether he was killed or not. The narrative would drift away from you.

As readers, we're carried by our feelings for the characters. Lush or poignant prose and situations, important and interesting themes, these things can only take us so far into a novel. At some point, if the character doesn't have enough at stake or we don't care enough for him (or believe in his motivations), the book won't work for us.


Also, regarding constant failure, it's really exhausting to read. I've read excellent books where the main character was beat up from page 1 to 400. Finishing was rewarding, but draining. Did I want to pick up the second book in that series? No. In part I read for escape. There has to be some variety. At least one good thing has to happen, one bright spot, one moment of humor and good fortune. Otherwise it's like reading a list of painful symptoms or deaths by unfortunate accident. Not exactly rewarding.

[polymath]

What degree of failure or success drives tension is a matter of audience targeting. Orson Scott Card's writing appeals to middle grade and young adult readers because author surrogacy's self-centrality, self-idealization, and self-efficacy appeals to younger readers. Young readers are still developing a capacity to process multiple viewpoints. Middle graders foray beyond black and white parentally imprinted viewpoints, like Card's surface Romanticism aesthetic of poetic justice, good will be rewarded, evil punished.

Young adults develop a capacity to process more viewpoints. Early adults more still. Middle adults more still, ever grayer shades of viewpoints. Late adults hardly know black and white, just 128 shades of gray. At least ones who haven't emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually arrested development at some point in life.

Ender's comparatively straightforward progress suits younger readers' entertainment wants, his external progress. His internal progress isn't as accessible to younger readers, nor does it need to be. Ender comes out a hero only after trials he must negotiate and reconcile. The reader group finds the emotional stimulus appropriate to its circumstances. Wish fulfillment and escapist rituals apropos to struggling youths encountering similar struggles and desiring independence from guardians' overbearing authority.

However, Ender's Game has a deeper degree of meaning in Ender's internal struggles, not easily accessible by young readers. Early adult readers don't quite grasp the deeper meanings. They may sense the influences but not consciously process them while reading and feel uncomfortable due to the unrealized persuasiveness. Like someone's talking over their heads and causing a feeling of exclusion.

Older readers readily access the subtext and deeper degrees of meaning and multiple viewpoints. Peculiar that Card's novel targets young and middle to late adult readers yet skips over early adults' appeals.

Of course, those are generalizations and not valid in every case. Some readers are more or less precocious readers than others.

[MattLarkin]

I know that MattLarkin's a fan of Ender, I'll be interested to hear what we has to say about this.

Well, I only read the first two books. The first one I liked a lot. Ender's pretty good at a lot of things. But he's also the small kid that gets picked on a lot. He does have to fight for his position, he just earns it quickly by his intelligence and tenacity. I think part of the appeal is seeing this wonder kid doing all this. It's a fast-paced sci-fi ride, and that's fun.

Also:

Spoiler:

Ender's entire first book is something of a failure. He does everything he tries to and becomes the Xenocide. His guilt from his actions drives his story from then on, and future generations condemn his unwitting actions.

However, I don't read a whole lot of sci-fi, and by far my favorite sci-fi series is Dune.