Interview: Sir Terry Pratchett
Disc spinner
As Brighton & Hove reads Guards! Guards!, this year’s City Reads choice, Andrew Kay talks to international best-selling author & creator of Discworld, Sir Terry Pratchett
Were you flattered to be chosen for City Reads, knowing the city will be reading Guards! Guards!?
“I think the term flabbergasted would be apposite. If I recall I said upon hearing the news: ‘What, all of them? Do they know how I write? Oh well! I didn’t force them’.”
What books did you read as a child?
“Very few indeed. At my primary school I was a very bad reader. Very good at remembering the names of plants and animals but words were just words, and the headmaster at the secondary school, HW Thame, would take kids at six years old and test their reading and if they read to a certain level then they would go into the A class who very likely would pass their GCE’s. They were, if you like, the lambs. I was then left with the goats. But my mum was a pushy mum even before they’d invented pushy mums and she knew I was bright.
“She got some books and she promised me a penny per page for every book read properly. You know how this ends. The fourth or fifth book was The Wind In The Willows and that really saved my mum a lot of money. I read it till it fell to bits and then I went down to the library like a bear on fire shouting ‘give me all the books!’. Suddenly I wanted to read everything.
“When I was still quite young I got a job in the library to be near all the books. I had spent most of my time at school halfway down the list of kids. When all the clever ones went off to higher places, as it were, I was now the brightest in the bunch that was left. When you’re on top you get a taste for it and don’t want to be not on top so I buckled down in those last few years to being actually A-class material as it turned out. Once you get kids to read I don’t believe you actually need to teach them very much more.”
Did the creation of Discworld offer you unlimited creative possibilities?
“Yes, and then again, no! There are some things I can’t do with Discworld. Which is why occasionally I’ll do something like Dodger or Nation. That takes me out of the rut perhaps. I can go and play as it were in a different corner of the playground.”
Do you observe and collect characters that you meet in life ‘for later’ as Death would say?
“Yes, absolutely. Nanny Ogg in Discworld was a real person, only I’ve changed her name. She wasn’t actually a witch, she was a nice old duck with a laugh that would’ve been taken away by the police. She liked brandy and she liked any food that she didn’t have to pay for. You pick up these characters but you have to like them, and I look at people like the characters in Dad’s Army. Mr Mainwaring is funny because people know lots of Mr Mainwarings whether they were young or old. Because they think they know the Mr Mainwarings the characters tend to come alive for them. A great many people wrote to me about Death in Discworld – inexplicably he’s always been quite popular and I’ll tell him so one day.”
Have illustrators managed to capture the pictures that you have in your mind when you write?
“There have been two main illustrators, Josh Kirby and Paul Kidby. Josh got the idea of Discworld but his successor comes far closer to how I thought about the characters.”
Is there any one character in your books that is based on you? Or little bits of you in all of them?
“Bingo! A tiny bit of me is Commander Vimes, another bit of me is definitely part of Tiffany Aching, and so on. I don’t know how it works but the author gets inside themselves and finds the bit of them that best suits the subject. Generally I always find one. I don’t know how it works and I don’t want to find out in case the magic goes away.”
My favorite character is Mort; do you have a favorite?
“It was such a lot of fun to do the Tiffany Aching series especially I Shall Wear Midnight. I put an awful lot into that book in every sense of the word and it seemed even to me that on the page it was real.”
Have you ever had a creative block?
“Yes, fairly early when I was writing Discworld books people kept coming up to me and saying ‘why don’t you do one about football?’ and I would say ‘what about football?’ And they would say, ‘you know, football!’. I’ve never attended a football match and at school I always had a note from my mum that I needn’t go to football because I had the lurgy – I could write my mum’s name quite well actually! I tried to do a Discworld football novel, I tried and tried and it didn’t work, even I could see that, and I put it on the back burner for a time and one day absentmindedly pulled it out and thought that if I started with the characters they would tell me how it should go, and they did. Don’t try this at home folks! But it worked. I made the characters people that loved football in various ways and I could recognise those characters and recognise why they liked football. And all the reasons why they liked football and actually I think Unseen Academicals turned out to be a very good book.”
You use puns and wordplay to great effect, do you gather them as you go and save them or do they come to you in the process of writing the books?
“Sorry, they just turn up. I snap my fingers and catch them out of the air. It really is like that, it’s just part of being a novelist.”
Were you satisfied with the TV adaptations that have been made of your work?
“More or less, yes. There was never enough money to do the things that we wanted. Hogfather in particular I thought was wonderful and that was the first. I’m hoping for some more.”
Which book has given you the most satisfaction?
“I Shall Wear Midnight and the Tiffany Aching books.”
Do you enjoy your success and in particular meeting your many fans?
“I like meeting fans because I was a fan once and because the authors in those days had some time for me I have some time for my fans too. Amazingly, the fans aren’t as mad as journalists would think. Okay, at conventions they dress up for masquerades but nobody’s perfect.”
Which character gets the strongest reaction from readers, and which are you the most proud of?
“Commander Vimes, I suspect. One thing about the Commander was when I was writing Snuff, by that time I had been writing about Commander Vimes almost through his entire working life as it were, and so all I had to do was wind him up and put him down in front of the plot and he himself sort of picked it up and moved it along. Admittedly it was all coming out of my head but nevertheless that was how it felt.”
What would your role be in the city’s eco-infrastructure if you lived in Ankh-Morpork?
“Toilet cleaner! Wizard – no, Alchemist – no, well as a properly trained journalist I think the Ankh-Morpork Times could do with a bit of rehab.”
Might we ever see you bring back the Witches?
“Possibly. It’s all to do with the Grim Reaper.”
If you had to choose one book by another author, what would that be?
“This is a horrible question to ask people like me. I would say Roughing It by Mark Twain. I liked his style and what he wrote and what fascinated me was that his writing sounded like that of Jerome K Jerome, the English comic author, and although the two of them were a world apart their writing and their outlook on humanity seemed identical, a fact which interested me as an adolescent.”
What is the best thing to find in your luggage?
“As someone who’s spent a long time airborne promoting my books several times going to Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the world I’m just lucky to find my luggage at all.”
City Reads 2013
13 – 29 September
www.cityreads.co.uk
