Sometimes I think there are only about different faces in the world. So has getting older made writing easier? Because round about now you should kill a major character. I believe in the goddess Narrativia. If I put Commander Vimes in a situation that has gone very very bad, a lot of interesting things will happen.
If you sit and plan, you get stuck in the planning. It sounds like magic. Anything that looks vaguely interesting is worth reading. It could be the history of washing up. Something in there would make it worth reading and it would pop up someday when we needed it. I put them on my shelf, with a little note to myself saying this is useful.
Maybe you just say what people won't say. Well, I had a letter recently from a very well-known mathematician who said that the way the wizards solve problems is exactly the way mathematicians solve problems. You'll find half a dozen mathematicians clustered around the blackboard, all arguing with one another, all fighting for the chalk. Some of them will be rubbing out part of the equation that another one of them has just written. And out of this kind of creative hubbub comes a solution.
That is exactly how the wizards work, as well. I'd like to talk a bit about the practical side of being a writer. You've said you are from the Carpentry School of Writing. And you think it's very important that writers work on their craft. Could you expand on that a bit? I have to say that I change the metaphor about once a week. But it may help if I give you an idea of how I go about writing.
I'm about 10, words into my next book. Do I know what it is about? Yes, I do know what it is about, it's just that I'm not telling myself. I can see bits of the story and I know the story is there. This is what I call draft zero. This is private. No one ever, ever gets to see draft zero. This is the draft that you write to tell yourself what the story is. Someone asked me recently how to guard against writing on auto-pilot.
I responded that writing on auto-pilot is very, very important! I sit there and I bash the stuff out. I don't edit -- I let it flow. The important thing is that the next day I sit down and edit like crazy. But for the first month or so of writing a book I try to get the creative side of the mind to get it down there on the page. Later on I get the analytical side to come along and chop the work into decent lengths, edit it and knock it into the right kind of shape.
Everyone finds their own way of doing things. I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it. The valley is full of mist, but you can see the top of a tree here and the top of another tree over there. And with any luck you can see the other side of the valley. But you cannot see down into the mist.
Nevertheless, you head for the first tree. At this stage in the book, I know a little about how I want to start. I know some of the things that I want to do on the way. I think I know how I want it to end.
This is enough. The thing now is to get as much down as possible. If necessary, I will write the ending fairly early on in the process. Now that ending may not turn out to be the real ending by the time that I have finished. But I will write down now what I think the conclusion of the book is going to be. It's all a technique, not to get over writer's block, but to get 15, or 20, words of text under my belt. When you've got that text down, then you can work on it.
Then you start giving yourself ideas. Well it seems to me that you must be an amazing observer. Do you think that's true that you must be a good observer to write really great parody or satire? For many years I was a journalist, and so I was trained to observe in a journalistic way. What I always say to people is that when it comes to inventing characters, don't base a character on someone you know. But it may be a good idea to base the character on a type of character that you know, because lots of other people will know people like that.
And if they know people like that, then half the work has been done for you. People say, "I know someone just like Granny Weatherwax! A great deal of character work lies not in describing the characters, but in describing the shape that they leave in the world. How they react to other people. How they face things. When they keep silent.
The manner in which they say things. Character does not consist of telling the reader what color a person's eyes are and how tall he is.
You do not need pages and pages of physical description to get a character. You can get nearly all the physical description you need by one thing that character says that makes people think, "Aha!
I know exactly what kind of person would say something like that! I really do love to write. The curious thing is that during the last month or six weeks of a book, when I am editing, rewriting, refining and polishing my work, I say to myself: "If you're a good boy and finish this before the deadline, you're going to be allowed to write another book! You're writing a lot, going down a lot of blind allies, you're finding out how the plot is going to work etc. That is a fun period, and I look forward to it.
What I like doing is the actual writing itself. Once you've bought yourself the biggest word processor you can and you're living in the house you're going to live in, and you've got a nice desk, you're kind of running out of things to buy.
There's always a new computer! Well, yes, there's always a newer computer. This house has computers like other houses have mice. In a month or two, I'm going on a holiday in Australia. We go most years. I always take a portable computer with me. When I am on holiday, I write twice as much as I do as when I am at home in my office.
I'm relaxed, I'm having fun, I'm sitting out there overlooking the sea, with a nice glass of something beside me. The telephone isn't ringing; I haven't got any letters to write. I get up at six in the morning when it's light, and do some work before breakfast. Later on, we go out and have some fun. You go to bed when it's dark. It's as simple as that -- there's no electricity. My wife and I like holidays where you go and relax. You just lie there in a chair with a big drink in your hand.
The big decision is whether you should go for a walk, or just lie there some more. Would that be a banana daiquiri in your hand? Let me tell you about banana daiquiris. Years and years ago, there was a world science fiction convention "What seems to be happening more and more and I don't know why this is so is that a lot of people labor under the misapprehension that if they cannot write it's because some kind of outside influence is preventing them from doing so -- as if the universe itself is conspiring against their natural destiny of writerdom.
It had been a really hard day. I'd driven all the way from Pensacola and was quite tired. The hotel had done the usual: "Sorry, sir, we have no record of your reservation at this time. Finally, after being ever so unpleasantly English about it, I got a very, very nice room on the top floor. An American friend said, "I know. I didn't know that there was alcohol in a daiquiri. I thought it was a pleasant fruit drink. So I had the liter size. I thought, "It's been a long day, and I need a refreshing pick me up.
But in New Orleans, a liter daiquiri has twice as much alcohol as a half liter daiquiri. It was so delicious that I had another one. Then I thought I'd try a liter of the peach daiquiri, and I had about half of that one.
In the s comic books, sometimes a character would have a nuclear reactor fall on him. Then he'd become "Mr. I drank so much banana daiquiri that night that I think every cell in my body was full of banana daiquiri.
I became Dr. I think that's the only way I survived. I couldn't feel my upper lip for quite awhile after that, though. The point is, if you make a real daiquiri, according to a real recipe, you don't feel well again until tea time the next day.
If you make it with real cream and the two types of rum and all that, it is seriously bad for your head. The Bourbon Street daiquiris were a lot of fun. But when I'm in Australia I drink beer, because if you are in Australia and you don't drink beer you are prosecuted. Let's talk a bit about the book you collaborated with Neil Gaiman on: Good Omens. That was before email, so how did it work on a practical basis? What was the most challenging aspect of writing with someone else?
I'm sure what I have to say will echo what Neil has said. There are some bits in Good Omens which I know are mine. There are some bits in Good Omens which I know are Neil's. There are some bits which were Neil's idea which I wrote, and there are some bits which were my idea which Neil wrote. Some bits we no longer know exactly whose ideas they were, or who wrote them. By the time we'd gone through all the drafts, it had been written by some sort of composite entity.
We wrote it in the 14th century. We each had one phone line and a baud modem. We'd work it out: "OK, you send, I'll receive. It would have been cheaper and easier to have rung each other up and sneezed out the text in Morse Code.
I was the Keeper of the Disks. I insisted that there should only be one official version in existence at any time. The moment it split into two, we would be in dead trouble. But Neil would sometimes send me a disk with words, saying " This is the scene with so and so -- insert it here. It took us about six weeks to do the first draft. I think it worked because, at the time, we were each making a name for ourselves in our respective fields.
It's not that we didn't take it seriously. But we were relaxed. We thought we would earn some holiday money by doing it. The nice thing about collaborating is that there is one other person in the world who is thinking about the exact same thing that you are thinking about.
We both have a similar reading background, I suppose. It was quite rare when one of us came up with something that the other guy didn't know about. So we could bounce ideas off one another quite easily. Where did you meet Neil? How did you become friends? The Discworld books were just beginning to come onto the market in a big way. Neil was doing some journalism at the time. He interviewed me. We got on well, and kept in touch.
We're continents apart now. I think he's in the States permanently, I would imagine. Most people think Neil is American, anyway. Although he is firmly English, that's where he gravitates.
If you were forced to go live on Discworld for a year, where would you go? Probably as deserted an island as I could possibly find. I would live in the back of a cave for an entire year. Although, I have to say as I get older, Unseen University sounds like the perfect habitat.
No one expects you to actually do any work. You just show up for meals, which are quite good. You just find an office somewhere and move in. There used to be offices in Cambridge and Oxford which were a bit like that. In fact, some of the feedback from academia tells me that it was not so long ago that there were other universities where it was like that.
If you turned up, and appeared to know what you were doing you could almost fit into the university. You wouldn't be paid anything, but you could find an office somewhere that wasn't being used and everything was so disorganized that no one knew whether you should be there or not. Things have changed now, you know. People actually expect results. Someone who knew what he was talking about and was an interesting speaker could get by with it.
I was told a story that unused offices were nailed up, which meant they weren't subject to what you would call property taxes. So all you would have to do was go and pull the nails out of the door and move your stuff in. No one knew whether you were supposed to be there or not.
But if you were there for long enough, especially long enough for some staff turnover to take place, you were there permanently.
I just love that idea. You can't run a university as if it was a business, in any case. It cannot work like that. Some of the best ideas have come from people standing around in a common room shouting at the tops of their voices. You cannot regiment ideas. Do they Americanize your books, either the adult or the children's books?
For example, the Harry Potter books are Americanized. They have Americanized my children's books. I think that there is an argument for preventing confusion.
We're talking the "pavement vs. If the use of the English word is not only unfamiliar, but changes the meaning of the sentence to the reader, then it makes some sense to change the word. As an element of fiction writing, metafiction self-consciously and systematically draws the reader's attention to itself as a constructed literary artifact.
By doing so, metafiction requires the reader to contemplate the relationship between fiction and reality as they progress through the story. Some of Pratchett's metafiction techniques take place on a larger scale, such as his satirization of Shakespeare plays for Wyrd Sisters and Lords and Ladies , while others take place at the sentence level, such as punctuation-based jokes or direct references to genre tropes.
This technique encourages the reader to read critically by reminding them that the fantasy world and characters of the novel are only constructions—but it also prompts the reader to consider the power that storytelling can have by demonstrating its sway over the novel's inhabitants. The Fool fumbled in his sleeve and produced a rather soiled red and yellow handkerchief embroidered with bells.
The duke took it with an expression of pathetic gratitude and blew his nose. Then he held it away from him and gazed at it with demented suspicion. No, my lord. You can sort of tell the difference if you look closely. As many book reviews can tell you, humor is a major defining aspect of Pratchett's work, both in his clever one-liners and in the novels' overarching satirical structure. In his humor, Pratchett used a wide range of techniques: puns, parody, semantic disconnect, logic overextension, reversal of reader expectations, allusions, satire, and more.
Given its prominent role in his novels' reading experience, a number of scholars have started to analyze his use of humor, both at a strictly linguistic level and as a means of conveying deeper literary meaning.
The Supreme Grand Master rapped his gavel for attention. Despite setting his primary book series on a world that literally requires magic to exist, Pratchett uses magic sparingly in much of the series, especially in the Watch and the Industrial Revolution subseries. When he does incorporate magic, there are clear rules and there are always high costs—often more than characters would have been willing to pay, had they known what they were getting themselves into.
This antipathy towards magic as an "easy out" creates more character-driven storytelling in Pratchett's novels, so that the characters are often facing a fantastically dangerous problem but are trying to solve it via cleverness or skill, instead of relying on magic themselves.
Even the Wizards and the Witches subseries rarely show the major characters using magic themselves to solve a challenge, even though magic may have created those challenges for them. If you use magic in fiction, the first thing you have to do is put barriers up. There must be limits to magic. The story really starts when you put limits on magic. Where fantasy gets a bad name is when anything can happen because a wizard snaps his fingers.
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