According to some reports, as many as 1% of ALL books sold in the U.K. are by Terry Pratchett. In addition he is reputed to be the most shoplifted author in Britain. His long-running series of novels set in and on Discworld are runaway bestsellers. As an avid Discworld fan and given the opportunity to interview Terry for the second time in her life, Miranda eagerly read his latest offering Night Watch before putting a few questions to her hero.
Miranda: It says in your bio that you once had a terrible experience few hours within your work experience…what was that about? (“He started work as a journalist one day in 1965 and saw his first corpse three hours later, work experience meaning something in those days.”)
TP: It was a terrible experience, and I think it was about 4 hours in. I saw a dead body.
A dead body?
Imagine having to see a dead body on your first day of work! Just as we got to the site a farmer was pulling the body out of a well. It was a concealed well that ran under the road, but no one knew was there. It was very old and had been boarded over years, and there mud and grass had grown over the boards. The guy that bought it was jumping off his tractor onto the ground - he went straight through the boards and down the well. It was full of mud at the bottom, so he in fact suffocated rather than drowned.
Nice, did you ever think that perhaps this wasn’t the best way to start your career?
No. At that particular time on Monday mornings before this day I always had a geography class. I remember thinking that I had learnt two things: one was that this was more interesting than having geography, and two that it is possible to keep being sick, even though you’ve run out of things to be sick with.
So it didn’t put you off?
No not really.
Was it the first time you had seen a dead body?
No, when I was very small one of my grandmothers took me to a neighbors funeral. I think I was about 6, it was sort of tradition then to have the bodies laid out in a coffin with the lid off, all prepared for people to pay their respects. My granny made me look at the body, and I swear (I hope it was my genuine recollection and I haven’t made it up) that someone had said “Bless him, his holiday did him good.” All I know I saw was this rather waxy looking person. I just thought it was an old man asleep, I didn’t actually take in what it meant.
The movie version of Good Omens... (a novel by Terry about the apocolypse)
What did you want to know?
Where is it at?
Probably in the toilet I would think. We were still looking for money last I heard. I keep out of it.
You have had quite a time getting that off the ground haven't you!
Oh yeah the first version certainly, that went down the pan. And they were mucking it up a fair bit of the story - you know taking the four horsemen out, and they wanting the anti-christ to be bad but redeemed by the powers of good in the end and some other crap like that. I don’t think that they paid us money that they were contracted to pay us - I personally was so glad that it didn’t happen, I would have paid them the money in the end.
To not do it….
Yeah like, someone comes around and saying “Unless you pay us we are going to MAKE A MOVIE OUT OF YOUR BOOK!
A huge threat! Are you going to continue with the Science of Discworld books? I think I learnt more from them than in any class in school.
I don’t know, it’s really up to the scientists. Jack is very keen but Ian is less keen. It is really whether a publisher wants to continue with them more than anything else. I don’t want to rule anything out. The first one was massive fun, the second one was quite fun. I’m not aware of any plans. I think Jack and Ian have both got really eclectic minds, its a lot of fun working with him but I don’t know, none are planned.
The first one changed my mind about a lot of things.
Yeah its fun for me and a good discipline. And I was curious about the whole thing because I realised with horror that on planet Earth, people live literally in the bones of their ancestors. They say that most chalk and limestones are made up, however you slice it, of the skeletal remains of an ancient creatures. If you think of it like that its kind of weird and funnily enough my realising that that was weird lead obliquely to a book that I’ve just finished.
Cool! Is it a Discworld?
No, good heavens no.
Well lets get on to this Discworld novel then. The baddie in Night Watch Carcer, seems to not have any redeeming qualities at all.
He may have been kind to his old mum, I just didn’t know about it.
That’s true, but where did he come from? You base many of your characters on real people, but he just seems sort of ….
I think lots of people don’t like him, but I suspect that is because they’re far more likely to meet him on planet Earth. We’ve all known people like Carcer before, he’s just an out and out nutter - no endearing defects; he’s fairly real. In fact my agent said he loved the story but Carcer wasn’t realistic. But I think I went to school with two Carcers.
I went to school with a kid that stabbed someone with a pencil.
Yeah, see? The rest of us have got these little social things that stop us being like him, but some people don't have them. He is the kind of nut job you just can't stop.
But surely even the worst people in the world have redeeming qualities?
But I don’t think that makes up for everything else.
No.
Do you think I owed it to my readers to put in a footnote: “Actually he always put the toilet seat back down.”
Yeah, I think it might have made a difference -it was just every time I read about him, I got goosebumps...
Good, you should be threatened by him. I mean he is menacing, he is intelligent, he is probably a better thinker than Vimes (the Chief of the Watch.) And Carcer is the kind of person that good people have to die to remove from the planet. I mean does the name Fred West ring a bell?
As in Rosemary West, the UK multiple murderers?
Yeah, abominably abusing young women before chopping them up and burying them in the cellar. Now Fred West might have had a pet rabbit that he was very fond of as a child, but that to me doesn't move the scales of justice very far. It was a good exercise to write about this bad guy who was really REALLY bad. Not like James Bond baddie, who tells you what he’s thinking. You don't know what he is going to do.
But don’t people read your books to escape from reality? Isn’t it your job to not remind them of reality? I don’t know what to say to that - except that perhaps my job is to remind them that there ARE people like Sam Vimes. G. K. Chesterton, (pictured right) who I often quote; said once in an essay that you cannot say fairy stories are bad because they tell children that there ARE dragons, because in fact fairy stories are good because they tell children that dragons CAN BE KILLED. Actually, giving away lots of plot here, Night Watch is a bit more sophisticated than that because Carcer does not get killed at the end. He’s going to be, but what is actually going to happen to him is something worse. He’s going to go through the machinery of justice and be hung by an entire city. I was so pleased when that happened because I wasn’t expecting for it to turn out like that, and suddenely Vimes came out with a long diatribe that is more terrifing for Carcer. Because he doesn’t get to die all nice and clean, he is going to go through the dreary process of a trial, a conviction. He isn’t going to die in a graceful way, not as a martyr, but by the great process of law - which is just going to grind him up. That seems quite horrifying; but he deserves it because he’s a bastard.
Yes he was! Now is Carrot, (a night watchman) my favorite character, based on anyone?
Good grief no, though he might be. He’s a bit cunning under his innocence I think, I’m not sure that he’s totally nice and deep.
Well he seems so naive at times, but then at others, not so.
You're never quite certain with Carrot. At the end of the Fifth Elephant, you aren't sure how much he knows and doesn’t know. After all his rival in love is disposed of without Carrot lifting a finger and it makes you wonder. If someone has a destiny, do people around them get warped by the field? Do their lives get warped to the benefit of the person who has the destiny? I don’t know if Carrot is entirely a nice guy.
Well I would like to think that there are people like him out there. You’re not going to split him and Angua up are you? In one of the books there was a whisper that she was considering going away and I almost stopped reading. Laughs I don't know. It is all about endings isn't it - Night Watch would be a bad book if Carcer won - but you know that Carcer’s not going to win.
But you don't HAVE to have happy endings I guess... but that would be sad.
But there’s some people who say to me 'we really expect you to write light gag filled books' and I think ‘No! Please shoot me in the head, someone! Don’t force me to write LIGHT!’ Because I haven’t done a gag driven novel since Equal Rites. They’ve always had some core that went beyond the gag but not so much in the last five or ten books, and I think they were the better for it - but there’s still plenty of humour. The book I am writing now might hit a happy medium. It is called Monstrous Regiment….
Is it a Watch novel then?
No, there are very few characters that you have seen from previous novels and when they turn up they are only playing minor roles. It is about a young woman who for very pressing reasons cuts her hair short and wears trousers and enlists as a soldier.
That is the story from that Disney movie… Mulan?
It is actually a story of sweet Polly Oliver. But the idea of a girl dressing up to follow her lover is endemic certainly in the western world. Have you never heard of sweet Polly Oliver? (Sings) As sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed, A sudden strange fancy came into her head. "Nor father nor mother shall make me false prove, I'll 'list as a soldier, and follow my love." So early next morning she softly arose, And dressed herself up in her dead brother's clothes. She cut her hair close, and she stained her face brown, And went for a soldier to fair London Town. Then up spoke the sergeant one day at his drill, "Now who's good for nursing? A captain, he's ill." "I'm ready," said Polly. To nurse him she's gone, And finds it's her true love all wasted and wan. The first week the doctor kept shaking his head, "No nursing, young fellow, can save him," he said. But when Polly Oliver had nursed him back to life He cried, "You have cherished him as if you were his wife". O then Polly Oliver, who burst into tears And told the good doctor her hopes and her fears, And very shortly after, for better or for worse, The captain took joyfully his pretty soldier nurse. I just wanted it so we could see a war. And for other reasons. And I think that the story of something light mixed with something a little darker might be more to some peoples taste.
What if your fans don’t like it?
Well when Small Gods came out lots of fans hated it and now surprisingly it features fairly high in people’s lists.
So us fans can always change our minds….
Yes.
What is a typical Terry fan?
I don’t know.
Is there a typical Terry fan?
Someone when reviewing Night Watch said that my fans are like freemasons. Some of them are quite high up and you don’t know who they are until something happens, until two of them meet each other and a chance remark and they are like ‘Wow, you read him too!’ I don’t know that there is a Discworld fan, I’m not certain that there ever was.
Are there new fans coming aboard, or are you losing fans?
What do you mean by that?
Well in the past few books you have taken a darker turn and I wondered if that netted you new fans or turned away others...
I’m not certain that the new fans are, I don’t think they are going to suddenly start reading Discworld because they think ‘Ah! This one has got a different kind of cover on it!’ I mean Josh Kirby died, which makes it hard for him to do covers, I mean artists don’t go on doing paintings after they have died.
Musicians keep making music after they have died.
Yeah!
Some of them are more popular after death!
Yes. But I don’t think that a fan is going to say ‘Hey, this is not such a light, gag driven story and now I’m going to start reading him. I don’t think it works like that.
How do you write now? I remember asking you last time we spoke (10 years ago) and you said it was sort of like a slab of clay you threw on to the wheel and it emerged from that. Is that still the way you do things? Do you start a story in the middle? Do you write backwards?
Yes. In fact the answer to all of the questions you just asked is Yes.
I should have asked more open ended questions.
I used to treat the word processor as a glass typewriter. Lets take the example of Night Watch. I had written the ending a third of the way through which wasn’t the ending that actually eventuated, but the ending I thought was going to happen. I go ahead of myself and write good bits but I don’t know what is going to happen, and again when I get there it might not be quite I expected, but I know what I am aiming for. For example on the machine upstairs I’m a third way through of the book but there are two different places in the book where different things are going on. You could say that the second draft has gone so far, and the third draft is going down a different road. Which isn’t too hard to do, I have to keep notes to keep track. I’m actually writing a slightly different book than the book I began. I had a number of characters and I didn’t know too much about what differentiated them. When I let them play themselves out I realized that X didn’t like this, and Y had an issue with such and such. And so I have gone back to fill in the bits I didn’t know. I’m just making use of the power of the word processor.
Thanks Terry, see you in another 10 years!
That was one of the most scattered interviews I have ever had Miranda, but a very good one.
According to some reports, as many as 1% of ALL books sold in the U.K. are by Terry Pratchett. In addition he is reputed to be the most shoplifted author in Britain. His long-running series of novels set in and on Discworld are runaway bestsellers. As an avid Discworld fan and given the opportunity to interview Terry for the second time in her life, Miranda eagerly read his latest offering Night Watch before putting a few questions to her hero.
I don’t know what to say to that - except that perhaps my job is to remind them that there ARE people like Sam Vimes. G. K. Chesterton, (pictured right) who I often quote; said once in an essay that you cannot say fairy stories are bad because they tell children that there ARE dragons, because in fact fairy stories are good because they tell children that dragons CAN BE KILLED. Actually, giving away lots of plot here, Night Watch is a bit more sophisticated than that because Carcer does not get killed at the end. He’s going to be, but what is actually going to happen to him is something worse. He’s going to go through the machinery of justice and be hung by an entire city. I was so pleased when that happened because I wasn’t expecting for it to turn out like that, and suddenely Vimes came out with a long diatribe that is more terrifing for Carcer. Because he doesn’t get to die all nice and clean, he is going to go through the dreary process of a trial, a conviction. He isn’t going to die in a graceful way, not as a martyr, but by the great process of law - which is just going to grind him up. That seems quite horrifying; but he deserves it because he’s a bastard.