Discworld Divinity

An interview with the man with a trademark floppy hat. No, not Indiana Jones (or even Dr Who), but ... Terry Pratchett. He talks about his latest works, Discworld and, well, the art of being Terry.

SFC: 'The Last Hero' relies on Paul Kidby's illustrations as much as the written word. How much input did you have on each other's work?

Terry Pratchett: I had a lot on his, but he had somewhat less on mine. I wrote 'The Last Hero' knowing that it was going to be illustrated, which was one reason why it was shorter than a full-length novel.

I had an upper limit, I think, of forty to forty-five thousand words. But when you know that the people and scenery are going to be illustrated, you don't actually have to describe it in too much detail. It's there! I got to see an awful lot of drawings at the pencil stage.

Equally, when I see how Paul's drawn the characters, that influences the way I think about them. But it's true to say that the influence is rather more me to him.

SFC: Does it affect the way you write your story? Or the style?

Pratchett: In this particular case, yes. Although this is only the second time that I have done an illustrated work. The other instance was with Josh Kirby when we worked on the original 'Eric', which wasn't as lavishly illustrated as 'The Last Hero', but it was still written for the accompanying drawings. And it to the extent you write it knowing it is going to be illustrated, you pick a plot line and characters which will lend itself to illustration.

I was also looking forward to the astronomical illustrations. I have on my wall the original of one of my favourite drawings; it's the one where the characters are on the moon and they're looking towards the 'Discworld' and the huge elephant's eye.

That's what I've always wanted: an illustration of 'Discworld' seen from space. One that treats it as a genuine astronomical object. I would love to see more drawings like that.

SFC: Do you have any plans to collaborate with Paul Kidby?

Pratchett: We have some loose plans. Both of us have got other things to do and, to be frank, it cannot be a collaboration for one very simple reason. It takes Paul the better part of eighteen months or more to do the illustrations. And it takes me about three months or less to do the writing. So while I can go back and tinker and change and add, it's not the type of collaboration you would have with two writers who would literally be sitting side by side.

SFC: Speaking of collaboration with writers, do you have any plans to do that in the future? Or was once enough?

Pratchett: No. It was enjoyable working with Neil Gaiman on 'Good Omens', but no more collaborations are planned.

SFC: Is 'Good Omens' still in the pipeline to be made into a film by Terry Gilliam?

Pratchett: If they can get the cash from the States. I believe they are still looking for fifteen million dollars - I hear various sums. Terry Gilliam went off to make his 'Don Quixote' movie while they were still trying to raise money and you know what happened to that.

SFC: Yeah. It went a bit belly up?

Pratchett: It certainly hasn't enhanced the chances of 'Good Omens' being made. I'm keeping out of it. The people in Hollywood aren't very sophisticated thinkers by and large; they cling to a rock and filter their food out of the water. I'm not holding my breath for Good Omens the movie.

SFC: The animated 'Discworld' series was very successful. Are there any plans to make the 'Discworld' stories into feature films?

Pratchett: I get lots of approaches, which I tend to be fairly crisp about for various reasons. One is that too many of then are from people who do not have the means or the money to go ahead with the project, but who still want to own the rights in case a bigger fish comes along. I'm not going to be caught out on that.

On the whole, movie people want to own everything. I don't know how much of 'Harry Potter' Warner Brothers now owns, but from what the fans say, it's actually rather a lot. 'Discworld' is about thirty books, plus all kinds of ancillary material, and that's not something I am going to hand over to a movie company in exchange for quite a lot of money. I've already made quite a lot of money, that's the real problem.

People come along with a movie deal and say, 'Heh! We can make you rich.' And I say, 'But I'm already rich. You can make me happy if you want?'

It may happen - we might find a way at some point. But I'm not hugely enthusiastic about a 'Discworld' film. I'm not even certain it's possible to do one; I think there are only three or four books that could be made into a good 'Discworld' movie.

SFC: I know 'Mort' was rumoured to be on the cards to be made into a film at one point.

Pratchett: 'Mort' was hanging about because a guy I know as a friend has got the rights, and he has got some integrity too. But after ten years, its been on the point of being made three or four times, then sunk away. It might happen, but then anything might happen. Although it would be true to say I'm not doing anything to help.

The thing you have to remember is that 'Lord Of The Rings' was massive in the 1960s and it wasn't until the next century that it got made into a decent movie. 'Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy' was massive in the 1970s and hasn't been made into a movie yet! These things take time.

SFC: So if a movie was hypothetically in production, would you like quite a lot of say in how it was produced?

Pratchett: No, I would like quite a lot of money! I don't think there is a director out there who is going to take much notice of what the author actually thinks about anything. The best thing you can do in those circumstances is say, 'Give me all the money in the world and then its yours', and I'm not inclined to say that. I don't think you can run the world on that basis.

I know the fan groups have lots and lots of discussions about whom would play whom, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, it's who is available and who is cheap.

SFC: There are a host of spin-offs from the 'Discworld' books, such as computer games, diaries, Clairecraft figures and so forth. How much input do you have on these?

Pratchett: If it's written, I have a huge amount of input, to the extent that I will have written or edited most of the words.

I see the Clairecraft figures photographed in wax. We have a little rule of thumb which is, if I can't prove it wrong, then it's right. It doesn't have to be my idea of what someone looks like, as long as the details mentioned in the books are right.

We have had one or two problems where the sculptor has got the wrong idea, but I have never had to go to the mat over them.

I was involved in the computer games quite intensively, but they are all history now. The other stuff, such as it is, is fairly low-key and I deal with it at a semi-fan level.

SFC: Speaking of fans, you have a close contact with your fan-base via the internet, book signings and conventions. Do you think authors should be involved with their readership?

Pratchett: I think it's entirely up to the author. I don't think it is laid down anywhere that writers should, and, speaking from where I sit, I can see advantages in not being too closely involved. You get asked for a lot of favours, but my office rule has to be that I don't do them.

Someone says: 'Would it be all right if you could send me an autographed photo'. If we do, then a month later: 'Can I be really cheeky and ask for an autographed photo for my mum, my uncle, my mate, this man I met in the pub and my hairdresser's nephew.'

The point is, I was a science fiction fan as a kid. I used to go to conventions, I did the whole Doctor Who fannish bit. So I understand the fans and rather like the scene in a strange kind of way. It has always seemed to me that the signing tours and the rest of it are part of the whole deal you sign up for.

SFC: Going off-subject, what did you think of the'Lord of the Rings' film?

Pratchett: I thought it was an absolutely magnificent film. I think it's is one of only two films I have ever seen which were almost better than the book that they were based on.

SFC: What was the other movie?

Pratchett: The other one was the 1960s production of 'Far From The Madding Crowd', which had Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Terrence Stamp in the three major roles. It was incredibly good.

Both the books concerned were quite dense. In each case what the movies did was invoke the spirit and scenery of the novel very well. In both books, the landscape was very important. I won't say they replace the novel, but they certainly enhance it.

SFC: What's the main sources of inspiration for your writing?

Pratchett: I don't know. Things happen. I have read for pleasure, including a lot of history, for many years. Ultimately, the novels just write themselves in my head.

SFC: What books are you reading at the moment?

Pratchett: I am re-reading 'Etiquette For Outlaws' by Rob Cohen and David Wollock. It is what it says, it is a book about - let's open it at random - how to buy porn from sex shops, the etiquette of tattooing, or how to be a pimp!

It's all good stuff. Very funny: what you might call the low life's guide to etiquette. I picked it up on a signing tour but didn't get around to looking at it until recently.

There's also a rather nice book called 'Strange And Secret Peoples' by Carole G. Silver. You may or may not know, but in Victorian times there was an awful lot of paintings and interest in fairies. This details the Victorian obsession with fairies and the occult.

I also have the 'Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher'. God knows who published it. It was first published in 1898 and it's just a book about rat-catching written by an old rat-catcher.

I read weird stuff. The little byways of history, shall we say.

SFC: Do you read any other comic fantasy?

Pratchett: No! Since I started, there have been four 'Next' Terry Pratchetts, which isn't the fault of the authors who were publicised as the new 'me'. So I keep away from the genre. The only guy I would own up to is Robert Rankin, and I make no secret of the fact that I thought his Brentford trilogy was the best stuff he ever did.

SFC: Your latest book, 'Nightwatch', features Commander Vimes quite heavily and there are many characters you return to in your books. Do you have any particular favourites - do the more familiar characters seem like old friends to you?

Pratchett: Well, they're fictional. I'm not. It's always worth bearing that in mind. I would say that the most interesting characters, from the point of view of a writer, are the ones who are screwed up in their head. That means people like Granny Weatherwax and Commander Vimes.

Vimes gets put through the wringer quite a lot in 'Nightwatch' and that makes him a far more interesting character to get inside the mind of than, say, someone like Rincewind. It gives him an extra dimension. It makes him more human and it makes him more like us.

People like Susan, Vimes, Granny Weatherwax and Death too, are the ones that hold the most amount of fun for me.

SFC: It has been said Nightwatch is slightly darker and covers more adult themes?

Pratchett: What do you mean, that they weren't adult beforehand? There's a revolution. People get killed. That's stuff for kids. There's been a lot of discussion about this; Nightwatch has been number one in the UK for the past nine weeks, and, I think, it has sold more than any other discworld novel to date.

I am getting lots of mail about the book, but I don't think there has been any really negative comments. It is dark and people do get killed, so the humour is closer to the humour of M*A*S*H. It's the humour that comes out of bad situations. Also, there is a bloody revolution, there's secret police, there's a torture chamber. You can't place too many gags into those situations.

Lord of the Rings is incredibly dark. Lots of really bad stuff happens to people, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. A dark book, a truly dark book, is one where there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Where things start off going bad and carry on getting badder before they get worse and then it's all over.

I am kind of puzzled by the suggestion that it is dark. Things end up, shall we say, at least no worse than they were when they started ... and that seems far from dark to me. The fact that it deals with some rather grim things is, I think, a different matter. LOTR deals with some grim things, not that I am suggesting that there is any similarity between the two books.

SFC: From what I've read so far, I must admit, I haven't thought it was any darker than any of the other books you've written.

Pratchett: It's much closer to something like 'The Fifth Elephant' than it is to 'The Colour of Magic'. There's no doubt that one of the reasons why 'Discworld' has survived so long and so well is that it does change. It has evolved. Because if this was the thirtieth 'Discworld' book about Rincewind and the Luggage, I would be prepared to slit my wrists ... and I don't think the series would have too many readers in any case.

SFC: Is there any subject you wouldn't parody or satirise?

Pratchett: Well, there's not a whole lot of laughs in paedophilia is there? I don't know who said this - I know it wasn't me - but they said there's nothing you can't make a joke about, but there are quite a few things that you shouldn't make a joke about.

For example in 'Nightwatch', Vimes breaks into a secret police torture chamber and finds the cells where the prisoners are kept. While nothing is described, the scene pulls the right levers to get your imagination working. The point was, if I had filled the torture chamber with the comfy chair and soft cushions from Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch for a laugh, that would have been an obscenity.

We know there are such people as secret police and we know there are such things as real torture chambers in the world today and sometimes you just have to say this. So there are, you always have to be careful. You have to feel your way and make decisions as you go.

The one thing you can't do too often is what I call 'The A-Team'. Of course, you're far too young for the A-Team.

SFC: No, no, I'm not, I remember 'The A-Team'.

Pratchett: You may recall that the A-Team would machine gun the bad guys car for about five minutes, then everyone would get out and walk away. They're probably responsible for rising gun crime all over the western world. Telling kids there's five Uzi's worth of concentrated fire on that car and the bad guys get out, and one of them has hurt his leg.

SFC: My wife asked me to ask you this because she has just finished 'The Truth' ... seeing as you used to be a journalist, which character do you think you are closer to journalistically, Cut-my-own-throat Dibbler or William De Worde?

Pratchett: Oh, William De Worde. Large parts of 'The Truth' are based on my experience as a young journalist. Not the bit with the vampires, obviously, but William De Worde's whole approach and his complete sense of bewilderment that now, just because he's got a notebook and a pencil, he has got this amazing amount of power. There are some scenes in 'The Truth' that are actually based on things that happened to me when I worked on a newspaper. Are you a professional journalist?

SFC: I am not. This is purely voluntary.

Pratchett: Okay, because I've been interviewed by lots of journalists saying that happened to me, this happened to me. Anyone who has ever worked on a local paper has had to deal with the unusual shaped vegetable story.

SFC: The last children's book you wrote was 'The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents', which got a lot of critical acclaim. Do you find writing children's books easier or harder to write? Or is it the same as writing for anyone else?

Pratchett: Harder, if you do it right. For all kind of reasons which are almost impossible to quantify but I would say picking something at random: kids. They are pretty media savvy these days. They don't know as much as I do because they haven't lived as long.

So whereas you are writing a book for adults and you put in a throwaway reference to the Beatles, for kids it really is a throwaway reference - you have thrown it away. The chances are they will not get it.

For example, in 'Thief Of Time', I've got the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, the one that left before they became famous. Now this is much funnier to adults who can remember there are a whole slew of people who left groups before they hit the big time.

With kids you have to be aware of what they are not likely to know about. You have to be a bit more careful with the language, you have to put in chapters which you don't do for the adult books. Ultimately, you have to write the books in a different way, but I can't really tell you what it is ... I just know how to do it.

SFC: Do you have any advise for budding authors?

Pratchett: I get asked this an awful lot. I think the advice that actually would work is: get a job on a television comedy show with a nice catch-phrase for a few years and then the publishers will fall over themselves to offer you a contract.

There's more truth in that than you may think. These days I think publishers like people who come with a certain amount of media weight behind them. There's Alan Titchmarsh, a TV gardener who is also now a novelist. Become famous doing something else is the answer. It's possible to get in that way. It's getting harder and harder now - and lets face it, it was never very easy - to get published just by sitting there and being an author.

Also, be young, possibly at university and keep reading. It's very strange, even when you take it with a pinch of salt, that some girl at university has sent half a novel to a publisher and they've now paid her two million quid. God! They don't pay me two million quid. And you never hear from them ever again! It's very strange. You never find out what happens to the book.

SFC: Do your 'Discworld' characters ever surprise you?

Pratchett: No, they may not do something I was expecting at a particular point, but subsequently as I'm writing, I realise that is what the character would do.

I think if you get a character working properly, three-dimensionally, then will react in certain ways according to the basic programming you have done. That might not be the way you initially would expect them to react.

SFC: Do you read reviews of your own books?

Pratchett: I don't go out of my way to, but I get sent huge wads of them. I get to see quite a lot.

SFC: How far in advance do you plan your stories?

Pratchett: It depends on what you mean 'plan' and what you mean by 'stories'.

SFC: How far in advance do you plot out your story-lines?

Pratchett: I never plot out the story-lines in the way you're thinking about. You know, 150 little cards, each one with a little scene written out. I don't do it like that. What I do is I write draft zero, which is a process I can't explain.

SFC: So you just tend to literally write ...

Pratchett: No, I'm just trying to assemble my thoughts to give you a clue. This is the man on the tightrope trying to tell you how he keeps his balance.

I'll start off with a couple of ideas and maybe a character and theme which I'll think about for a while: how will that work, well, we'll do this, we'll do that, we might need another character too.

You'll sit there and think about this for a while, then you realise you've got something quite interesting going. I start to write at that point and this is called draft zero. It's playing with the idea and the characters to see how it would work.

Sometimes it doesn't go very far and sometimes the concentrated process of thinking about it kind of retro-engineers your idea. The purpose of draft zero is like doing a big charcoal sketch. You can see how the story ought to be going and certain things emerge from the process. The writing is a way of concentrating the mind on the story.

In fact, quite often when it's going very well, I'll wake up in the morning and I'll have to start making notes immediately because somehow during the night, certain things have sorted themselves out. That takes up to two thirds of the time of an entire novel because once I've got draft zero well and truly sorted out, the first, second and third drafts are really just going through it on my word processor.

That happens reasonably fast because you've got the shape, you've got the characters, you've got a lot of the dialogue and it's really a case of almost sanding and polishing.

It's ridiculous talking about drafts in any case when you're working on a word processor, because I can go backwards and forwards. I'm writing the end of the next book now, very nearly the last scene. But I haven't finished parts of the middle, although I know what they are going to be and I know what has got to happen there.

It doesn't seem a strange idea to me to do it like this because, after all, movies are very seldom shot linearly.

SFC: One last question. What new books and projects do you have planned?

Pratchett: I'm just finishing a book for November which is called 'Monstrous Regiment' ... that's an adult 'Discworld' book.

In May 2003 there will be 'The Wee Free Men'. That will be like 'Morris', obstensively a children's 'Discworld' book. I'm planning to finish this novel and then have a bit of a holiday for a while, because I've been writing books back-to-back for quite a long time.

I know full well once I sit down thinking, oh I haven't got a book to write, what shall I do, I'll start writing anyway. I won't be under pressure.

SFC: Thank you very much.

Phil Jones.

Large thanks goes to Terry Pratchett for sparing so much time to talk to me and being so open and honest and also Donna, my wife, for encouraging me to do it.

(C) Terry Pratchett and SFCrowsnest.com 2003
all rights reserved

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Discworld Divinity An interview with the man with a trademark floppy hat. No, not Indiana Jones (or even Dr Who), but ... Terry Pratchett. He talks about his latest works, Discworld and, well, the art of being Terry. (AUTHOR INTERVIEWS) McMullen'ing it Over One of the brightest new voices in science fiction writing to hit the genre for a long, long time. And struth cobber, he's Australian. Author Sean McMullen is most definitely interviewed. (AUTHOR INTERVIEWS) Hart to Hart Publishing guru David Hartwell, currently filling the hotseat as a senior editor at Tor, chats with Stephen Hunt about why only one per cent of the SFF slush pile is of publishable quality, the joys of owning The New York Review of Science Fiction, and the contribution made by the Philip K. Dick Awards to the field. (PUBLISHING SPOTLIGHT) Windy Miller Frankly, what science fiction and fantasy illustrator Ron Miller doesn't know about fine painting could be etched onto a pinhead using nanotechnology. And he's not really windy … we made that bit up because it sounded good as a title. Paul Barnett of Paper Tiger interviews Ron for the Nest. (ARTIST INTERVIEWS) Noreascon Four News Next year's world science fiction convention is about to put up its prices before opening its doors, so jump in quick. (CONVENTIONS) Fans Will Battle(star) Fans fed up with Farscape being cancelled are now up in arms about the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica. In fact, they're calling for a boycott. (NEWS) Darkness Falls Darkness Falls is the latest slight and extraneous scarefest to hit the big screen in dull, meaningless fashion. Director Jonathan Liebesman helms a ridiculously familiar and arbitrary cheesy horror tale that doesn't effectively challenge the simple conventions of the fright genre. (FILM REVIEWS) Daredevil There were elements of grandeur thrust upon writer-director Mark Steven Johnson’s dark superhero flick Daredevil. Despite the anticipation of the famed stoic blind crime-fighter’s arrival on the big screen, Johnson’s sensationalistic fantasy is, surprisingly, another arbitrary stunt-infested movie that has plenty of kinetic movement yet never really goes anywhere with its energizing format. (FILM REVIEWS) Dawn After Trip's shuttlepod is attacked, he finds himself stranded on a rapidly heating moon with an already inflammatory enemy. More Star Trek Enterprise deconstructionalism from the pen of Timothy W. Lynch. (TV REVIEWS) Eulogy for a Dream Marianne Plumridge asks, with the Columbia shuttle disaster, just what happened to our dreams of space? And will we ever dare dream them again? (ARTICLES) Offworld report: February 2003 William Gibson makes a break from the world of science fiction with his much lauded Pattern Recognition, Peter Jackson is interviewed - about Lord of the Rings, what else - and Gary Westfahl stirs up a storm over the space shuttle disaster. (NEWS) Wooden Rocket update The 'Oscars' of the online science fiction world have opened with over 3,000 votes for 632 different web sites in the first month. Jessica takes a look at some of the early nominations in the Wooden Rocket Awards. (AWARDS) Arthur C Clarke Shortlist The Arthur C Clarke Awards shortlist has been announced and includes M. John Harrison's 'Light' and China Miéville's masterpiece 'The Scar'. (AWARDS)

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