Isegoria

Orson Scott Card explains that his only “start-quick novel” was Ender’s Game:

I had had some traction with the novelet “Ender’s Game,” and I had already committed to its main character as the protagonist of Speaker for the Dead. I needed a novel version of Ender’s Game to properly set up Speaker, so readers of the EG novel would be prepared to pick up the story 3,000 years later. (Time dilation in lightspeed flight allowed frequent travelers to live through millennia.)

I already knew, from expanding Mikal’s Songbird into the novel Songmaster, that you don’t novelize a short story by tacking twenty chapters onto the end. If the short story works, you start way earlier, developing characters and situations leading up to the same climax and resolution that worked so well in the short form. (If they did not work well, why are you novelizing it in the first place?)

[…]

To show Ender’s childhood family, I handled it quickly by putting Ender in my own family, back when there were only three of us kids. In my family, my sister was eldest, and a four-year gap between me and my older brother made us anything but close. So Ender grew up with a hostile older brother and a protective and kindly older sister — both of whom had come close to being drafted themselves.

Every vile thing Peter did to Ender, my own brother had done to me. Every in-joke between Ender and Valentine was based on real memories shared with my sister. In this tiny cell, the parents seemed as distant as prison guards, quite unlike my own parents, who were in the main much more nurturing and involved.

Once Ender got to Battle School, he was placed in various armies led by somewhat older children. My most powerful understanding of military command came from reading Bruce Catton’s brilliant trilogy about the Army of the Potomac in the American Civil War. Lincoln’s frustrating search for an effective commander for the army that campaigned between Washington and Richmond became the semi-deliberate basis of all the bad-to-mediocre army commanders Ender came across.

So apart from trying to invent tactics for combat in a cubic enclosed space in zero-G (Shuttle astronauts confirmed for me that their own experiments in the cargo bay showed that I did OK with my thought experiments), I was relying on either my own life or powerfully-remembered history for my characters and their actions.

[…]

In my life I had never been a leader, as far as I was aware. But I had always been impervious to peer pressure, never aspiring to “coolness” and never achieving it, but always deciding what I wanted to do and then doing it. I always considered my actions in childhood and adolescence to be real — when I wrote, produced, and/or directed plays in college, often against faculty opposition, I regarded my plays as actual productions, fictional in content but real in the execution. When Ender never loses sight of the goal of Battle School, which was to win the war against the Hive Queens, it does echo my constant attitude that my scripts and productions were never “student work,” but real dramas and comedies for real audiences; my competition was not other students or even the variably talented faculty — my competition was Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. I never came close to winning that competition, but in my mind, that was my playing field and my aspiration. I gave Ender that kind of ambition — he didn’t care about being top student, he cared about preparing himself and his best colleagues to face the Hive Queens in combat and destroy them, thereby saving the human race once and for all.

By mining my own psyche and memories of experiences and readings, I was able to write the novel with NO additional research and development. I wrote the early chapters in a week, getting Ender into Battle School. Then my publisher sent me on a brief signing tour for my novel Saints (published incompetently under a stupid title with an appallingly bad cover). This being before the invention of the laptop computer, I wrote nothing that week. But unconsciously, I was developing Ender’s story like mad. I got home and immediately got back to work. I wrote the rest of the novel, including Ender’s post-war transformation into the original Speaker for the Dead, in just under three weeks. I printed it out on my NEC Spinwriter and mailed it off to my then-editor at TOR, Harriet McDougal (married to the soon-to-be-famous Robert Jordan).

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