A few weeks ago, prolific sci-fi / fantasy / comedy writer and Discworld author Terry Pratchett made his way Down Under for Nullus Anxietas* – the first Discworld Convention ever held in Australia.

This was my first real foray into serious fan culture, and in between freaking out about how much useless trivia some people knew and having hysterics about the face that people would actually buy a calendar entitled ‘Women of Sci-Fi’ (apparently they do) I taped a public interview between him and a member of convention staff.

The following is an edited** transcription of this interview for your reading pleasure.


* _{“No worries”}
** _{A lot more was said in this interview. The following are selected sections that may be of interest to writers on this site. Additionally, a lot of ums, ahs, wells, youknows and reallys were omitted from this transcript for readability purposes, except where I felt they were crucial to either the tone or meaning of the sentence.}



TERRY PRATCHETT - NULLUS ANXIETAS - 10.02.2007


[Interviewer]
Your books seem to have become progressively darker as they go on. Do you see them progressing further down that path?

[Pratchett]
Well, Making Money (his next release about Moist von Lipwig, the star of Going Postal) is certainly not dark. Oh, it has people going slowly mad, ha ha ha! That’s quite amusing I suppose! (Audience laughs) Oh, and there’s a few deaths! And I kind of resent the suggestion that things are being dark. The conclusions I don’t think are dark.

Well, maybe I should say, “more adult”.

The people have a hard time and perhaps things are a bit more cynical but I think the endings tend to be moderately upbeat. I mean, I enjoyed writing Thud! And Thud! has got some very dark passages. But in the middle of the dark passages, there’s Sam Vimes and, and it’s suddenly six o’clock and you realise he’s going to go into Where’s My Cow… He’s fighting these dwarves (swings imaginary sword) – “THAT’S NOT MY COW!”

…

Do you find yourself writing for your audience more than yourself?

(Pauses and sighs.) Well, of course, I am part of my audience. You get a kind of feel for who your audience is; what the kinds of people are. But I’ve got to enjoy it. I’ve got to be satisfied with it, or happy with it, or smile when I’ve got an idea for a gag. And I think – I kind of assume I’m a kind of average person, so I think if I find that funny, or interesting or moving, probably enough other people will. I suppose the thing is that conventions and similar things are the kind of subconscious market research. And the same with the fan mail, things like that. … Allfan [?] practically exists to tell me where I get my ideas from.

There isn't much physical description about the characters in your books. Is that deliberate?

...People, when writing scripts, especially speculative scripts, put physical descriptions in of major actors, because doing that will automatically narrow down the stars who could play that role. What you do is you leave that – you don’t go into too much detail – but you describe the character by the shape that they leave in the world. How they react, what they say, the nature of their silences, what other people think about them, all of those things. Those are the things that make up character, not what colour their hair is.

So do you find you have to reserve time for yourself to do the writing, or –

(Interrupting) It doesn’t work like that. One big kind of road to Damascus revelation for me, was, someone would say come do this talk, this talk, whatever, and we’d look in the diary and say, oh, yeah, that day’s free. And then you realise, that day is not free, I’ve got written down in huge invisible letters you can read a long way off, “WRITE BOOK!” (Laughter.) So, no day is actually free because it says “write book”.

I never turn down an invitation to come down to Australia, because I like doing it, and frankly, if you’re in like, the upper class or something, it’s not a great hardship. (Pauses briefly.) Choosing the wine, possibly. (Laughter; Pratchett scratches his head rather sheepishly.) Ah, sometimes it’s not at exactly the right temperature. No, it’s fine, but I get invited to lots of things now that I’d quite like to do and there just isn’t enough time. I want to write! I mean, the thing is, I said yesterday, when a book’s new, and I really know the outcome – I really think it’s going to work – I’m kind of on fire with it. At the moment, in my actual head, in stop motion, there is a scene in Nation (his current work-in-progress - not necessarily a Discworld book) and it’s tragic, and it’s funny, and…

(Pauses, then makes to get out of his chair.)

And I think I’ll actually go and write it down. (Laughter.) And it’s great that this has happened because it’s something I’ve had in the back of my mind for four years. It’s matured. All I’ve got to do now is write it down, and that’s one of the moments that you live for and it just buoys you up like helium. You get high on it except you don’t talk in such a high-pitched voice and it sort of carries you along. The curious thing is, really all books start like that, and at the end it’s this bloody book you’ve been working on all this time. You just want to get rid of the bastard so you can start the next book.

…

You just want to shoot yourself in the head because you’re doing all that editing bit at the end and that’s kind of tedious and you’re going backwards and forwards and then you lose track of the chronology. You say, “hang on, does – does Vimes know this bit at this point?” And you trying to track down these threads and you’re banging your head against it. And the book isn’t so much finished as grabbed. The editor says “We’d better have it now, thanks” – but – “Argh! I’m still working on this bit!” cos you think if you had another month you could make it so much better. But of course that thing applies no matter when they take it. If you had another month you could make it so much better, but sooner or later it comes to the point where you’re going to kill yourself if you sit in front of it again.

In your stories, did your editors get a say in various plot points, or the way things should end?

Well, they never have. Not many – not in any – not to the extent of arguing with me and saying “we don’t like the way this ends” – that didn’t happen at all. I think it’s quite the reverse, because … oh now we’re getting to the down and dirty bit! (He leans forward conspiratorially.) No one really knew how it worked. These books were coming out, and they were selling, and no one exactly knew why. (Audience laughs.) In fact, I was being under-edited I think. People were thinking, you know, it’s like this magic trick where you balance a lot of plates. “We don’t know how he’s doing it, but we’d better not interrupt him.” (Laughter.)

I think I probably didn’t get enough editing in those days. I don’t get too much – what the editors do is they tend to be continuity editors. So, things like, “I don’t like…”, “He wouldn’t know this by now,” all that sort of thing. They act as kind of beta test readers and say “this bit just doesn’t work. You haven’t explained it right, you’ve repeated yourself here and here.” That kind of stuff.

When I’m writing for kids, that gets really heavy because children’s editors really get to grips with the book at a fairly early stage, and really do tend to make suggestions and things. I do the first draft, and “that bit really needs to be tightened” and “she wouldn’t do this” – all the rest of it. I mean, it’s not an unpleasant thing – everyone’s working to make a good book – and out of all this weird, very unstructured process, a book is produced.