Speaker for the Dead

the original short story, "Mikal’s Songbird," on which Songmaster had been based were also two of my stories that had been nominated for awards.   In fact a novella called "Songhouse," which was really the opening chapters of Songmaster , had also been nominated for a Hugo.   The only story of mine which had been nominated for awards and that wasn't about music was the novelet version of "Ender's Game"!   So Kristine had inadvertently caught me in the unconscious process of imitating my own past successes. I knew she was right--the music motif may have won me some favorable attention, but it was time to set aside that crutch and do something else.
    So it would be a speaker of death in my story, not a singer.   That felt right.   But here's the silly part.   Perhaps I was still unconsciously trying to lean on my most successful previous work, but I immediately wondered, What if the Speaker of Death was Ender Wiggin?   It was obvious to me what I was doing--if I can't do the music thing, I can still bring the kid-who-saves-the-world back for another round!   And yet the idea appealed to me. I didn't trust it yet, but it appealed to me.
    After all, Ender had to do something after destroying the Buggers. What if Ender Wiggin comes to an alien world as a Speaker of Death, and accidently gets caught up in the mystery of why these piggies are slaughtering each other? It had a delicious symmetry to it--the man who, as a child, destroyed one alien species now has a chance to save another.
    The idea sat there in the back of my mind for many months and as it did, the story grew.   More to the point. the character of Ender grew. I had never thought much about what he would do after winning his war at the end of "Ender's Game," except that his life would never be that interesting again, and he would have a terrible time adjusting to normal human life. A, writer friend of mine, Jim Tucker, had once proposed doing a sequel to "Ender's Game" that involved bringing Ender back to Earth, but while the story he came up with had some appeal, I knew in my heart ~ the one thing Ender could never do was return to live out his life on the birthworld of humanity.   Having him become a speaker for the dead, however, wandering from nation to nation and world to world, researching and orating for the dead—that, I thought, was a wonderful way to reconcile him with the human race that had used him up as a child.
    Gradually the ideas came together.   When my agent, Barbara Bova, said that she'd like to sell a book to Tom Doherty’s new publishing house, Tor, I realized that the book I wanted to write next was Speaker of Death.   So I wrote an outline and the first few chapters, the contract was written, the deal was made. I was living in lndiana at the time, working on a doctorate at Notre Dame and finishing up Hart’s Hope , Worthing Chronicle and Saints for another publisher. It wasn't until the recession interrupted my degree program (forever, I'm afraid--no doctorate for me now!) and sent me to Greensboro, North Carolina, for my only stint doing honest labor since 1978 that I had a chance to get back to Speaker of Death .
    What I discovered then--the spring of 1983--was that the book was unwritable. In order to make the Ender Wiggin of Speaker make any kind of sense, I had to have this really long, kind of boring opening chapter that brought him from the end of the Bugger War to the beginning of the story of Speaker some three thousand years later!   It was outrageous. I couldn’t write it.
    When Compute!, the publisher I was working for as a book editor, sent me along to the American Booksellers Association convention in Dallas, I noticed that Tom Doherty himself was at the Tor Books exhibit. I greeted him, and then on impulse asked him if I could talk to him. I had no well-formed plan in mind, and I was a little frightened when he said, “Sure,” and set an appointment not long after.   Our meeting consisted of walking through the crowds as I explained to him the problem I was having writing Speaker .   The only solution I could think of, I said, was to write a novel version of Ender's Game, so I could put all that material about how Ender became a Speaker for the Dead at the end of that book, thus allowing Speaker to begin at its true beginning.
    Once I proposed the idea   (having only thought of it a short while before) it seemed so obvious that I wondered why I        hadn’t tried to sell anovel version of