Retro News: Pratchett interview, in which he actually talks about things other than Alzheimer’s (29 November 2008)

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Deborah Orr at the Independent.co.uk interviewed Terry Pratchett late in November, and in doing so provides some insight into Terry Pratchett’s writing process.

The article gets the requisite Alzheimer’s questions done early. Terry Pratchett summed up the effect of his very public diagnosis:

“If I’d known what a progressive brain disease could do for your PR profile I may have had one earlier.”

He says several enlightening things about writing and his writing process:

On satire in his books: “[My books are] satire of what? [Critics] think that satire is going on, but not of anything. Authors I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I’d lay my cards down on that, and say that it’s that that I’m trying to do.”

On writing in the fantasy genre: “When you were a kid, you’d have a paint box and you’d take it to school. But there was always the rich kid, and he’d got the paint box with the silver and the gold and possibly the turquoise as well. Instead of doing the best you can with the colours you’d got, you really wish you had the colours he’d got. Fantasy gives you the silver and the gold and the turquoise.”

On general Discworld writing: “Discworld is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.”

On children’s books: “For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books. So you work out this kind of little equation in your head and you think, yeah, like Nation – the one that’s just come out – that’s a book for kids. And people will say: ‘Well it covers very adult subjects …’ Yeah, that’s why it’s a book for kids. Because you want kids to grow up to be adults, not just bigger kids.”

On Monstrous Regiment: “[Monstrous Regiment] was great, great fun to write and I’ve had lots of letters about it. I could have set it in the Napoleonic Wars … I’d have had to invent a few things, but it didn’t really need to be Discworld. I get a certain amount of extra fun with it in Discworld and I could take liberties in Discworld that I couldn’t take in a real historical novel. Actually some of the things I found out were too surprising even for Discworld …”

Pratchett also makes an odd request of the interviewer:

He asks me how many pies one might be expected to make from the rendered body of a large man. I assure him that I wouldn’t know, and he goes on, with some relish, to make a convincing case for about a dozen… He also makes a request of his assistant, Rob, the presentable young man who hovers unobtrusively and protectively. Could Rob just make a note of a metaphor, please? Could Rob just record that a man’s sagging adam’s apple had the appearance of a chicken’s giblets?

Could this be a sneak peek into the next Discworld book, Unseen Academicals? According to the article, the book has reached the point in the writing process where “you’ve got your characters working and you know how a book’s supposed to go. You think there are things that you don’t quite know because you should always be open to what is scientifically known as emergent behaviour…. It usually happens because a character says one sentence to another character and somehow, yes, it is around that quote that this whole book is now starting to spin, not because that quote is particularly memorable but it was exactly the right word at the right time. I now know a lot more about this character, and now this character knows a lot more about himself.”