Terry Pratchett InterviewWorldcon, September 2, 2004
The next twenty years would see Sir Terry’s star rise into the heavens. He has now written thirty Discworld novels, including the recently released Thud!, along with two science fiction novels, seven children’s books, and the incredible, apocalyptic collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens. Discworld novels have been translated into twenty-seven languages and sold more than twenty-one million copies worldwide, and Sir Terry has received both the British Fantasy Award for best novel, for Pyramids, and the Carnegie Medal for his Discworld children’s novel, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. In September of 2004, Terry Pratchett was made Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention in Boston. For anyone else, all of this amazing success might tend to swell one’s head a bit, but this son of an auto mechanic keeps everything in perspective. He decries being called “Sir,” never seems to tire of signing autographs for his adoring fans, and even showed up at the Worldcon opening ceremonies wearing a quite self-deprecating T-Shirt: Tolkien’s Dead!J.K. Rowling said no.Phillip Pullman couldn’t make it.Hi. I’m Terry Pratchett.I had dinner with Terry – still wearing the T-Shirt – a few hours later and got a chance to ask him about his childhood, his career, and the craft of his writing. This interview was the basis for a feature article about Terry Pratchett that appeared in Amazing Stories in January 2005. Now, for the first time, here is the hour-long interview in it's entirety. I always begin with this question: What was your favorite book as a child? For most of what would be called childhood, I didn’t read at all. I started getting into reading about nine or ten. The book that got me reading was the Wind in the willows, which was a very weird book. I mean consider the size of the badger, the mole, the rat, and the toad. It varies enormously throughout the book. The toad can drive a motor vehicle but can also get into a badger’s hole. There’s some curiously weird stuff going on. All of the animals can talk and interface with humans except the horse, which is just a horse. Only later on do you think this is really weird. At the time you think it’s quite neat. That’s the one that got me reading, certainly. Was reading something that your parents encouraged? Not to get Monty Python about things, but I lived in a house that didn’t even have cold water. My dad would run a hose pipe to the house next door a couple of times a week and fill up a big cistern over the sink. This was just after the war and you were glad you had a house with a roof on it. So little details like electricity and water were kind of secondary. My dad was a motor mechanic – he’s still alive – and my grandfather was a gardener. They took the view that reading got you up and out of it. What was your home life like? You grew up after the war. Obviously that’s different from the world we’re used to today. I was probably about ten or eleven before I watched television. That was great because I was old enough that it didn’t grab me around the throat. You watched the kind of television you wanted to watch and then you didn’t watch any more. I think that’s the single most important difference. Television never really got its claws into me. I wasn’t lost to television; or lost to the Internet, either. It was an age when there were still a lot of second-hand book shops around. So, did you read a lot after you discovered books? I read like Flint, like most science fiction authors. Lots and lots of SF and lots and lots of everything else as well. Where did your passion from writing come from? You must admit that fandom tends to encourage writing. Built into the whole thing is that comparatively free and easy interchange between fan and writers. There’s the unspoken suggestion that maybe you can do it to. There isn’t an impossible gap between reader and writer. And so, it was actually going to conventions and seeing these guys that kind of encouraged me in my desire to be a writer. So, you’ve been a part of fandom for a quite a while now? I’d actually written my first short story prior to going to a convention. In my teens, I only went about three of four conventions. They were kind of expensive to get to where I lived. But it was enough to introduce me to that kind of world. Back when I was seventeen, I got a job at my local newspaper. I eschewed going to University; even if that would have been possible [laughs]. But I was bright enough to know that the only way you could make a living from writing was likely to be journalism. You know, down and dirty, weekly newspaper, journalism. The number of people who were making any kind of living – any kind of living – from writing SF and fantasy in the UK in the 1960s could have been numbered on the fingers of one hand. Did you draw on your early journalism experience when you wrote The Truth? Yes, of course; in all kinds of ways. Some parts of the truth are true. The scene with the guy who’s threatening to commit suicide and turns out to be a lumberjack was true. I changed details but that’s true. A lot of William de Worde’s feelings also came from that time. Shit, I’m seventeen. I’ve got no training in this apart from what the guys back at the office are telling me. They give me a notebook and a pencil and all this power. When I write things down and people try to see what it is I’m writing. They put me in court. Okay, an older old journalist gives me some hints on how to report court cases. But that’s it. I’m in court. The right of the people to know what’s going on in court is me. Me. I’m seventeen fucking years old. I didn’t earn any of it. I thought I’d better learn to be good at this stuff. I love the distinction in The Truth between news and olds. News is what interested William de Worde, but olds – specifically people’s names – sold the paper. People want to read what they already know. In a sense that told me something about fandom and writing. Working for a local newspaper, there was a certain amount of complicity between the journalist and the readership. You both believe that this little town is one of the most important cases in the world. It must be because you’re writing for them and they’re reading your newspaper. To an extent, you get to know the kind of people who are your fan. They believe they have some stake in what you’re writing. It’s the whole Star Trek thing. But you have to proceed with some care. You cannot short change the fans. You know you’ve got to develop as well and you’re not going to develop if you keep giving them what they are telling you they want. So, growing up in the shadow of World War II, and then working as a newsman, where did you develop your sense of humor? World War II was over. There was no shadow. And, of course, I was kid. I was born three years after the war. You think everyone was going around saying, “Shit, World War II was ten years ago. I don’t think I can laugh anymore.” Actually in certain circumstances like that, you are more inclined to laugh. It’s over. Let’s have fun. I don’t think my sense of humor just turned up, but it was aided by the fact that I read a hell of a lot of the old humorists: Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome, and a whole slew of Englishmen you probably would not have heard of. We had a humorous weekly magazine called Punch. It wasn’t particularly humorous, some of it, but some of the best writers in the UK in the early part of the 20th century wrote short, humorous articles for Punch. In a sense I learned my trade by watching all the other guys do it. It wasn’t like I was looking over their shoulder as they made horse shoes or nails or something, but I was reading what they wrote and working out – subconsciously quite probably – how they did it. One of the things I love about the humor in your books, is how you can take a metaphor and not so much turn it on its ear, but – if you will – turn it over and smack it on the bum. In Monstrous Regiment, you set up the bit about the socks very early, and then the payoff comes twenty or forty pages later when Polly kicks the enemy in “the sock drawer.” Does that come easy to you? Many occur when I’m writing. But like a lot of authors, I carry around a classic little notebook, and if a mad banality occurs to me it may well get written down. The funny thing about Monstrous Regiment is that very little of it is actually invented; I mean in terms of the basic situation. There really were women who actually went to war, apart from Sweet Polly Oliver and other semi-legendary figures who got commemorated in song. Throughout the years in North America, cross-dressing by women to go to war was well-known. I’ve read estimates of up to 1,400 women fighting as men in the American Civil War for example. How do they tell where they got shot or wounded in a place that’s going to be embarrassing? And as for how do they go to the bathroom, as sergeant Jackrum says “In battle everyone pisses the same way.” People were a little more prudish about what they showed to other people, so it was quite possible for them to get away with it. A sergeant in Holland made a point of recruiting other cross-dressing females that she encountered. I didn’t have to invent a great deal of the basic situation. I just had to take it seriously. Most particularly, Monstrous Regiment is a quite serious book. The humor emerges from the direness of the situation. Like when Polly finds it very hard to swear. In fact a lot of women who did cross dress found the hardest thing was tolerating the bad language. She says at one point when, like in a good Shakespearean play, the cross-dressing is getting out of hand, “I wouldn’t be able to do that because then I would be a women disguised as a man disguised as a women disguised as a man and I wouldn’t know how to swear; and I really need to swear.” You say you didn’t invent the situation for Monstrous Regiment, but there was obviously a lot of research involved. How do you go about doing the research for your novels? I come by it by a kind of enlightened serendipity. I just read stuff for the sheer input. Occasionally I see a book and think, “That’s just going to be interesting.” Currently I’m reading Death’s Acre. About the body farm in Tennessee where they put corpses in the garden and find out what happens as they rot; provides all kinds of clues for forensic sciences. I don’t know why [I’m reading it], apart from the fact that it’s extremely interesting. Something in there I will find that will be exactly something I need to know. I guarantee. And it won’t be what you think it will be. It will be something different. Sometimes a little historical fact will send your mind off. I have to admit, I’ve read lots and lots of weird shit for many, many years. And it all goes into your head. Do your themes and storylines come to you in the same way? Most of them came all in one go. I only have an idea about how it’s going to go and the knowledge that I can get it there. It’s definite to say that there might be many interesting events on the way, and I won’t be certain of all of them. But I will be aware that they are there in some way. Do you outline or do you just follow the story? My first draft is an outline. I write an entire draft to see how it’s going to go. In fact, by the time I’m a quarter of the way through, I tend to go back to the beginning and start writing the first draft. The other one was draft zero. Now I know how this story wants to go. Thanks to word processing, at any stage what I’m writing may consist of: “This is third draft, then this is second draft here, and this is first draft, but it’s a pretty good first draft. It’s akin to working on a sculpture. It’s not a linear process. Your plots tend to be fairly convoluted with a lot of people interacting and not interacting. The plots themselves are completely convoluted. But what I do is use the break. Here’s the piece that’s going on here. Meanwhile the bad guys are doing this. But that’s just a film technique. Do you write those threads all at once? Sometimes I do. The nice thing about it is that normally when things are getting a bit tame in one place, they’re getting exciting in another. There really is no actual pattern to the way I work. And, I think, nor should there be. I work as the story dictates. In a sense it’s making it up as you go along. And making it up as you go along is decried. But that takes a modicum of intelligence, and if you’re prepared to do a lot of work afterwards, forging ahead and seeing how the story goes can sometime pay dividends. So you then, in a later draft, make changes to, say, bring a theme out a little more? Yes. If I didn’t actually realize that was going to be a theme and it is going to be an interesting theme, then if I just bring it out a little bit more at the beginning, that’s going to be more fun. The whole theme in Monstrous Regiment that started out as just socks became far more important than just socks. One of the girls says “When you wear them you can actually feel the socks pulling you through the world.” And sort of socks and sex inevitably get mixed up. That was interesting the way that developed. I hadn’t realized it would go that way, but segued very naturally. The trick is to know when that happens. You mentioned earlier how the humor in Monstrous Regiment arises from the dire situations. Are your books getting darker? A lot of people have said the series is getting darker, but if it’s nothing but gags, it’s not funny. Actually that’s not bad. I’ll say that again. If it’s nothing but gags, it’s not funny. I mean, MASH was dark. And so the humor arises from the desperate nature of the situation. You cannot have a novel set in wartime where people miraculously don’t die. That is not going to work. The situation has to be desperate. You don’t need too much of it, but you have to make it dire. Without giving too much away, in Monstrous Regiment, when the recruiting party had caught the enemy spy, I didn’t know what the hell they could do. I thought they’ve got a spy. They can’t take him with them. They can’t leave him tied up. That would be cruel. But you’re not really supposed to kill him. I didn’t know how to work this out. But I thought I’ve got all these characters – and they’re pretty well-drawn characters so they will work out how to kill him. And Jackrum’s solution was exactly right. Of course, you don’t kill him in cold blood. You actually quite cynically manipulate the situation so that he’s going to make an attempt to escape thinking he’s going to get away with it, and then you shoot him dead for trying to escape. Polly realizes Jackrum has set this up, and decides, “so what? What else were we going to do?” And it becomes a great character moment for both of them. Exactly. What was so nice is that one of the best moments in the book was me practically hitting a block. I didn’t know where the story was going to go, so I let them sort it out. What are they going to do? You know that Jackrum is a cunning bastard. And I had a lot of fun with Polly, Jackrum, and Blouse, who is actually not a dumb officer. He’s an innocent – clearly in above his head – but he’s not stupid. And, the power struggle that Polly gets caught up in the middle of is kind of like Platoon, but not like Platoon in any other way. But there are two different views about how you should be doing this war. But you see it was a code of conduct novel. Take the scene where Jackrum comes into the court martial and gets everyone out except the officers he knows about. While it has things in it that are funny, it is quite a dramatic scene. Because you know suddenly he … he .. is exerting the power he’s got over them. It was quite a nice little courtroom drama. I was quite pleased with it. For me what has made Discworld work for so long, is that it is so diverse and populated with so many interesting characters. Unlike other series, it doesn’t rely on any one character or group of characters to move the series along. Discworld isn’t a series. Discworld is a series of series. Discworld is a canvas on which series are written. The children series is rapidly – in terms of sales and popularity – drawing level with the adult series, which is something I hadn’t expected. So, now my contracts are in terms of one adult and one children’s, which is quite unreal. So, you’re new adult novel is Going Postal. I’m assuming it has something to do with the post. Good lord, this man is a genius [laughs]. I’m not going to give too much away. It isn’t New York Post Office going postal. It’s the fact that all over the world – and I have found many examples of this – postmen under stress begin to horde mail. In trailers, in their attics, in their homes. They never destroy it because you just don’t destroy mail. But stashing it in your attic for tens of years is not the same thing in their minds. So, what happens when an entire postal service comes down with this complaint? That’s what’s happened. And now Lord Vetinari in Ankh-Morpork for political reasons wants a thriving post office again. It’s also a discussion, I suppose, about how do you make a real profit for the post office? Does it make a bottom line profit? Or, does the fact that all over the country, people getting their letters on time make a profit for the civilization? And then you get into kind of incessant political thinking. And, hopefully, I have a little bit of fun with that as well. Does the Watch get pretty involved? No, the watch does not get involved. There’s a completely new character. Put it like this, if I was a film studio head, he would probably be played by the same guy who played William de Worde. He’s thrown into a situation he doesn’t understand and has to learn fast. But in background, he’s an entirely different sort of person. I mean, he’s a con artist; he’s a trixter. He will bamboozle you. He’s in it for the game. Being bound to what is essentially a desk job is not how fortunes are won. He found a way to make being a postmaster exciting again. What are you working on now? I’m doing sketches for Wintersnip, which is the next book about the Wee Free Men, and Thud, a crime novel set in Ankh-Morpork. It’s called Thud because there’s a game called thud that’s very important to the plot. A game played by trolls? Trolls and dwarves. It’s very popular in the UK. I don’t know whether any sets have made it over here. It is a genuine Discworld game described as part of a Discworld book. Thud is a kind of a hard-boiled murder novel. “Thud – that was the noise he made as he hit the ground.” That’s a good Dashiell Hammett kind of intro. I’ve had a bit of a difficult year because I had sort of minor heart surgery and blood difficulties. But I’m through that, and I know I’m through it because I’ve been in situations subsequently that angina would have tickled me had I not gone through it, and I’m happy quite about that. So, I’m up to signing a contract and selling some more books. And I don’t know where it’s going to go next. You’ve said before that the members of the Watch are sort of your signature characters. Are Vimes, Carrot, and the rest of the Watch your favorite characters to write? Well, it’s because they’re coppers. There’s so much you can do with coppers. Tiffany aching in the Wee Free Men I do love writing. The City Watch and the Witches are the two that offer me the most opportunity. But we’ve had Going Postal and Monstrous Regiment are two novels without any of the major characters having a really major role. It’s necessary to do that. You bring new characters in and you don’t over-write the established characters. Even in The Truth, the Watch only plays a minor role. The nice thing was – and people have commented on it and I’ve used Granny Weatherwax in the same way in the Tiffany Aching books. We know that Vimes is a good guy because we see him from inside his head. From the point of view of William de Worde, he’s this obstructive guy. He’s a copper. He doesn’t want this loose cannon running around the streets causing trouble. He’s not a bit interested in the freedom of the press. From William de Worde’s point of view, Vimes is at best an adversary that you kind of have to reach an accommodation with. He’s not a natural ally. Patently, things look bad when the press and the police agree. Lord Vetinari, I suspect, is well aware of that. And there they are. I’ve got to slow down a bit anyway, simply because I thought, shit I’m 56. Two books a year. It’s not healthy doing that; and all the tours and things. You’re going to have to slow down. I should be doing what I want to do. Is anything happening with the movie projects? Truckers at Dreamworks is still alive. Mort is on the slab, but occasionally the corpse twitches. We get all kinds of approaches and mostly we say “no.” One of the things you have to do is give up a lot of your characters. Now it’s all about merchandising. And I don’t care [to do that] and I have enough money not to care. What about Good Omens? Well, Gilliam is now off the project, which may not actually be as much of a drawback as some people would think. He’s not renowned for the success of everything he does, and he is a very expensive director. Certainly the Samuelson brothers are now looking at other directors and have been talking to Neil, Lynette, and me. It may well happen someday, but again don’t hold your breath. Don’t cross your fingers. And now I am here [at Worldcon 62] as a Guest of Honor, which cuts me as a highly, highly weird thing. When I was a kid, guests of honor were golden giants half a mile tall, and I’m five-foot, six. I haven’t won any awards. The only award I’ve ever won that would mean anything to Americans, was the 2001 Carnegie Medal for The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which is a children’s book; albeit set on Discworld, but it was a children’s book. God knows why. Out of the blue, suddenly they give me a medal. But it kind of amazes me that I’m here as the guest of honor, because I’m not the kind of guy that I think guests of honor are. Well to us you are. To those of us who have been reading you for twenty years, you are a giant. Thank you very much. I like fans. I like book signings. To pick a phrase, one has a natural liking for the people from whom you have received … or have taken … so much over the years. [laughs] The books have made me an incredibly large amount of money. From the standard I had when I was twenty or thirty, I am very, very rich. But me and a guest of honor – I cannot fit that into the same frame. I’m kind of dwarfed in the company. I’m a nice guy and I write books that are popular, but I think guests of honor should be kind of better than me [laughs]. Okay, I can act like a nice guy and I write books that are popular. But being nice and being popular, I put it to you, is not sufficient. You should be good as well. There’s still a part of me that says that being clever is not the same as being good. And I am clever, and if you are clever enough you can spin the image in the same way that if the conjurer if is good enough he can make you believe he is a magician. But it’s all conjuring. I think for most of us it’s all conjuring. Our meals complete, Terry and I left the restaurant, but not before he insisted on picking up my tab, which as a card-carrying freelance SFF writer, I was honor-bound to accept. As Terry headed off to get a little rest before his next Guest of Honor engagement, I wondered about his statement about not being worthy. Modest as Terry Pratchett is about his own abilities, this five-foot-six-inch man is a true giant in the field. As I watched him walk through the concourse later that weekend, dressed in his characteristic black shirt and pants, black vest, and black, floppy hat, I could almost see the aura that surrounded him and allowed him to walk unfettered through the throngs of fans. The kids of today look up to and revere this new golden giant just as he looked up to the giants of old. Maybe it is conjuring. But I think that perhaps it’s just a matter of perspective. Terry hasn’t lost his over the years and we haven’t found ours yet. |
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Sir Terry Pratchett (he was named an
“Officer of the British Empire” for services to
literature in 1998) was first published at the age of
thirteen. His first novel, The Carpet People, was
published just ten years later. But it would be another
twelve years until the first Discworld novel, The
Colour of Magic, would appear in 1983.