National Book Festival webcast online--From Rim to Hub

National Book Festival webcast online

23 November 2007 (14:08)

Terry Pratchett’s appearance at the National Book Festival in September has been released online as a webcast on the Library of Congress website. In the half-hour speech and question-answer session, Pratchett talks about his coming books:
• Nation is “the book I’m working on now and don’t propose to tell you anything about,” a large part of which is written already. Interestingly, Pratchett describes the image that inspired the plot of the book: A boy, standing on a rainy beach, looking out to sea.
• I Shall Wear Midnight, the 4th Tiffany Aching book, is in the planning stage. Pratchett tells the audience, tongue-in-cheek, that Tiffany Aching will murder someone in the book.
• He’s interested in writing more children’s books after I Shall Wear Midnight, which will be the last Tiffany Aching children’s book.
He makes some general observations about writing:
• “Adult books give you money, children’s books give you prestige.”
• “The writing is some kind of big stainless steel bulldozer of some sort which just keeps going, and it drags me with it, usually banging my head on stones and things like that. Curiously enough, it’s a lot of fun.”
• “The way to describe a character is not with two pages about that character. The way to describe a character is to give them mannerisms, ways of talking and acting. Because we human beings have a lot in common about the way we judge people, remember people, [and] think about people, I put in the little triggers which will make you think subconsciously, ‘ah, that kind of guy.’ So the back-story tends to happen of its own accord.”
And he comments on the live-action adaptations of Hogfather and The Colour of Magic:
• “I loved the movie of Hogfather. What I really liked about it was the car chase. There wasn’t one…. [Hogfather] was true to the book. It was true to the soul of the book.”
• A scene in The Colour of Magic, where Rincewind and Twoflower escape from Death’s own dimension, pursued by Death on Binky, has been filmed.