A Slip of the Keyboard

by Terry Pratchett

  I remember speaking to the guy who had actually hauled the stuff in his tanker. And I said, “Were you worried?” And he said, “Well, not really. The last load I had to haul was prawns three months beyond their sell-by date. That did worry me a bit.”

  All those involved in the enterprise—including me, because I’d handled the media—got a little informal certificate commemorating our efforts. And since engineers are sophisticated humorists, it was printed on dark brown paper.

  And then one day … well, I can’t remember what happened at which power station at this particular point, I think Fred had done something. I spent all day answering the phones and I was so hyper when I got home late on Friday night that I opened up the computer and started to work. On Sunday morning, my wife came up quietly, saved the work in progress, and tucked me up in bed. And that was the last third of Equal Rites.

  I decided I had to get out of the industry as quickly as I possibly could. There was such a never-ending level of media interest it was messing with my head. Besides, the early Discworld books were selling well enough to make turning pro a possibility. I gave them a month’s notice. It was a fairly pleasant farewell, and they gave me a lovely statuette made of a kind of nice dull grey metal which I really treasure and I keep it by my bed because it saves having to switch the light on while I read.

  I finished … and then I wrote more—and possibly began a work rate which has led to the fact that I am now on blood-pressure pills. I lived in dread of not having work in progress. And I developed the habit of starting a book on the same day as I’d finished the last one. There was one period where I had a schedule of four hundred finished words a day. If I could finish the book in three hundred words, I wrote a hundred words of the next book. No excuses. Granddad died, go to funeral, four hundred words. Christmas time, nip out after dinner, four hundred words. And I did that for years and years and years, because I was fixated on the idea that if you have not got work in progress, you are in fact not a writer at all, you are a bum. And somehow I thought that if I stopped writing, the magic would go away. And I was getting some successes. The books were selling very well. Mort got to no. 2 in the bestseller lists. Sourcery got to no. 1 and stayed in the list for three months. And that started a trend which has continued to this day. I’ve lost count of how many books I’ve sold. I’ve heard fifty million, I’m sure of forty-five million. It’s hard to keep track. There are so many books and translations and all the backlists and things.…

  America turned out to be a problem. Some of you may have been privy to me begging on my knees for a Hugo last night. For a wannabe stand-up comedian like me, you’ll do anything for a laugh. Would I like a Hugo? I gather it’s unusual to be a WorldCon GoH without several. Well, I know that for most of my writing career I have been ineligible because my publishing history in the United States in the early days was marked by sliding publication dates, publishing out of sequence, publishing uncorrected, publishing with my name printed wrong. There were so many things … oh, and publishing and not telling anyone that you had done it, which is not uncommon. By 1998 I was so depressed about it all that I was quite prepared to officially hand over the U.S. publication rights to a U.K. publisher because some of you people, in fact many of you people, I suspect, were part of the new underground railroad by which tens of thousands of British hardcovers were being imported into the United States by the fans who didn’t like/didn’t want to wait for the U.S. versions. My publishers at the time didn’t seem to get their heads around this. You’d see me at a U.S. WorldCon signing U.K. hardcover after U.K. hardcover for a long, long queue; is there not something wrong with this picture? My editor tried to help, but without backup it all seemed an uphill struggle.

  Then my American agent said, “No, wait a bit. I think things are going to change.” And what happened was that there was a big shake-up at HarperCollins and at last I had a publisher who thought “This guy is selling gazillions, but not here! Let’s do something about it!” And they gave me a publicist who actually knew my name, which is generally a good start. In 2000 they even asked me to tour.

  Back in 1996 I did a signing tour which was miserable and horrible and I spent all my time flying backwards from hub to hub and living on lard balls and salt licks which is what you live on at airports. And it was a terrible tour and I didn’t want to do another one so when they asked me to this time I sent them a big list of demands, like:

  I’m not going to do any radio station called Good Morning, City-I’ve-never-been-to-before-and-will-be-leaving-in-two-hours;

  I’m not going to take any flight that gets me into a hotel later than about seven o’clock in the evening.…

  Oh, yes … arriving at a hotel at midnight is not good. I think it was Rocky Frisco who saved me in Madison, Wisconsin, because the hotel did no food but he had some cold pizza. That’s life in the fast lane, folks. You get in at midnight, you get cold pizza. And you’re up at 6:30 to do Good Morning, City-where-the-pizza-is-so-cooold …

  They agreed to everything. I was astonished. And on the 2000 tour the smallest signing I did was bigger than the biggest signing I did in 1996. I did a tour a couple of years ago, same size crowds, a bit bigger maybe than an English tour. Suddenly, it seems, I’m selling in the United States. And who knows, with a bit of effort all round, within a few years, I might get up to where we could have been in about 1996.

  And yet, I still feel like a fraud. It’s all been done in fun, folks. I had no big plans. I wrote the first few books for fun. I wrote the next books for fun. I did it because I really wanted to do it. I did it because I got something out of it.

  I was a fan, a real convention-going fan, for only maybe three years. Went to a couple of them in the early ’60s. Went to a WorldCon. Got a job. Started courting girls. And suddenly I was whirled away into what may loosely be called “Real Life.” While I have to say, when you work on a newspaper, life doesn’t appear to be all that real.

  In 1973 there was a convention in my area, and I thought, I ought to go back. You know, it’s been, what, eight years since I last went to a con. And I walked in, and there was no one I recognized, and I just couldn’t get a handle on it. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had gone in and gone back into fandom right there and then. Mind you, I do recall that Salman Rushdie actually came second in a science fiction writing competition organized by Gollancz in the late 1970s. Just imagine if he’d won—Ayatollahs from Mars!—he would have had none of that trouble over the Satanic Verses, ’cos it would have been SF and therefore unimportant. He’d have been coming along to cons. He’d be standing here now! Ah, but the little turns and twists of history …

  Where do the ideas come from? I do not know. But one of the things I did learn from my science fiction reading was that there were other things you could read besides science fiction. I developed a love of history, which school had singularly failed to inculcate into me. I am now in correspondence with my old history master and we get on very well. But his lessons hadn’t told me the things that were really interesting: that, for example, during a large part of the eighteenth century, you could actually get pubs to pay you to take urine away and the tanners would actually pay you to have urine delivered to them. That’s an interesting fact. It must be even more fun to know it when you are fourteen years old.

  I have to admit that I am currently in a position of having more bookshelf space than I have books. [Cries of “Oh!’] However, this is, of course, not counting all those books in the attic, the books under the bed in the spare room, the books wrapped up in protective paper in the garage. Those are the books you kind of, well, just have, they’re like Stonehenge. No one is ever going to do anything with them now, but obviously you keep them. Yep, I actually have empty shelves. I have got at least eight feet of blank shelves in my new library. I am sorry. But we went off to an antiquarian bookseller’s the other week, and I spent several hundred quid and now I’ve got probably only about four feet of shelving to fill.

  I
’ve made a lot of money out of the writing. A considerable amount. But I am horizontally wealthy, which is the way to go. I advise you all to consider horizontal wealth. If you are vertically wealthy, you think “I am rich. So I had better do what rich people do.” What do rich people do? Well, they find out where the hell Gstaad is, and then they go skiing there. They buy a yacht. They may go to beaches a long way away. Well, first of all, never buy a yacht. Yachts are like tearing up hundred-pound notes while standing under a cold shower. A nail, a perfectly ordinary nail, costs five times as much if it is a nautical nail. My PA is on at me to buy a light aircraft because he could fly it, but he was training to be a fighter pilot and maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea.

  But horizontal wealth means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! Change those catenary bookshelves for good hardwood ones! In my case, build a library extension to your office. And, of course, you buy what will be useful for that most wonderful of pursuits, blind research, which is research without direction for the sheer joy of it.

  Let me tell you, for example, the story of tarlatane, uncovered in newspaper accounts from the mid 1850s. Tarlatane was a kind of false silk, made in, I think, lower Saxony. A mineral was ground up, and mixed with paste, and rubbed into cloth, and polished in such a way that you got something that looks a bit like silk. It was a lovely brilliant green, and this young lady attended a ball for troops going to the Crimea, in London, one sultry summer’s night, and she had a dress made of tarlatane and shoes made with tarlatane and a bag made of tarlatane. Thus dressed, she danced the night away in this closed, rather humid ballroom, and no doubt little flecks of green spiralled off her dress as she whirled and danced from partner to partner, and then she went home and she felt a bit ill. And then she felt very ill—and after a couple of days of horrible torment, she died of acute arsenic poisoning. How do you make tarlatane? You make it out of copper arsenate. And this is terrible. And this is tragic. But as an author, you look up and you see the glow, the whirling dancers, the beautiful girl, the deadly green glitter in the air. And this is so cool! Sorry … but you know what I mean.

  I was reading an old book on alchemy and it talked about an alchemist in Austria, who got—I can’t remember which emperor it was—to pardon him. He was brought before the emperor on charges of falsely claiming to be able to make gold. He could see the man was unwell, recognized the symptoms of arsenical poisoning, and made a bargain that if he could cure the emperor of Austria he would be allowed to go free.

  He tested everything. He tested bread, he tested meat, he tested the water. The emperor got worse and worse. Then he got hold of one of the big candles used in the royal bedroom and weighed it. He went down to the market and bought another candle the same size and weighed that, and found that the royal candle was a pound heaver than the other, because the wick was almost solid arsenic. Lovely stuff, arsenic. I have several different ores of it, it’s quite my favourite poison. And every night, when the candles were lit, the emperor was slowly poisoned—and that became part of the plot of Feet of Clay. Where do you get your fantastic ideas from? You steal them. You steal them from reality. It outstrips fantasy most the time.

  And I wish I could tell you how many other incidents like this there are. In The Wee Free Men, the village has a tradition of burying a shepherd with a piece of wool on his shroud, so that the recording angel will excuse him all those times during lambing when he failed to attend church—because a good shepherd should know that the sheep come first. I didn’t make that up. They used to do that in a village two miles from where I live. What I particularly liked about it was the implicit loyalist arrangement with God. Americans, I think, sometimes get puzzled by people in Ireland who call themselves loyalists yet would apparently up arms against the forces of the crown. But a loyalist arrangement is a dynamic accord. It doesn’t mean we will be blindly loyal to you. It means we will be loyal to you if you are loyal to us. If you act the way we think a king should act, you can be our king. And it seemed to me that these humble people of the village, putting their little piece of wool on the shroud, were saying, “If you are the God we think you are, you will understand. And if you are not the God we think you are, to Hell with you.” So much of Discworld has come from odd serendipitous discoveries like that.

  I read and read and read throughout my teens. I was a child born just before the TV generation so it never really caught me. I haunted all the bookshops. I read every book I could find. I picked up stuff like a Hoover, and remembered it out of the sheer joy of finding out that the universe is stuffed with interest. Knowledge kind of drifted down out of the atmosphere.

  The first book I ever bought for myself was Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. There are some milestones in my career, and one I am possibly most proud of is that I was asked to write an introduction for the book’s Millennium edition. I’ve got just about all possible editions of it. A great, great help to a fantasy writer. When I needed to find out exactly how you build a clock of flowers in order to tell the time by the opening and closing of the blooms, I turned first to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and there it was. So that’s where I get my ideas from. I look them up in books. How do you write the stories? You make it up as you go along. This is a terrible thing to have to tell people. But I’ve spoken to other authors and when there is no one else nearby, that’s what we agree that we do. We just have different definitions of make up, go, and along. And possibly of it, too.

  Currently, I’m writing the next adult Discworld book. What I have is a title. I know that in this story there is a children’s book, and the children’s book is called Where’s My Cow? and Commander Vimes is reading to young Sam Vimes, who is just over a year old. And young Sam Vimes must be read to at six o’clock every night. No matter what the Commander of Police is doing, no matter how serious the political murder he’s investigating, he will go home to read to his little boy out of Where’s My Cow? It is important to both of them.

  Where’s My Cow? has a very small vocabulary. It has been chewed all around the edges. And the narrative runs: “Where’s my cow? Is that my cow? It goes baa! It is a sheep. That’s not my cow!”… and so on, through various barnyard creatures; parents here will know what I mean. Vimes reads this every night and thinks, “This kid lives in a city. A big, big city. The only sound that animals make in the city is sizzle.” And he looks around and the nursery has got sheep on the wallpaper, and bunny rabbits and foxes and giraffes with waistcoats. Why? And he thinks, “What would the urban children’s storybook be like, with all the seamstresses and the beggars and things like that? What kind of noise does a beggar make? ‘Blaugh! For some money I won’t follow you home!’ ”

  And I know, I know, that in this book, which is barely under construction, there’s going to be a moment where Vimes is reading through it for the umpteenth time—and this book is soggy, his son goes to sleep chewing this book—and he is going to look at it, and in the back of his mind is this terribly complex crime, and somehow that little book is going to become pivotal to the solution. I don’t even know what the crime is yet!*1

  I spoke to Neil Gaiman about this the other day, and he said exactly the same thing. You have this little oasis of exactly the right piece of plot, and you know it’s going to work, and you have no idea yet what the connective tissue is. The book’s called Thud! because it is based on a game called Thud which is actually available in the U.K. It’s a game between trolls and dwarfs. It’s specifically designed to be played by trolls and dwarfs. Maybe that’s why we’re not selling many to humans! But also, in a kind of nod towards Dashiell Hammett, it’s a good way of starting a murder mystery. “Thud! That’s the sound he made when he hit the ground.” From there, you can go anywhere.

  Unfortunately for me, at the same time as this I am also writing the next book in the Wee Free Men series.

  Writing two books at the same time—which is incredibly bad for your health, I’m
on six pills a day already, which has given me the water-retaining capabilities of a drainpipe—writing two books at the same time is actually quite nifty because you can take a rest from writing one, to write the other. Now you know how I got where I am today. And again, I’m writing scenes which are good, and I don’t know where they are going to fit in the book.

  But it’s what I call “The Valley Filled with Clouds” technique. You’re at the edge of the valley, and there is a church steeple, and there is a tree, and there is a rocky outcrop, but the rest of it is mist. But you know that because they exist, there must be ways of getting from one to the other that you cannot see. And so you start the journey. And when I write, I write a draft entirely for myself, just to walk the valley and find out what the book is going to be all about.

  I’m sure true writers do not work like this. I know for a fact that Larry Niven uses lots of little postcards, and writes the outline of each scene on one. I know this, because once upon a time we discussed doing a beanstalk story together. Both of us wanted to do it, and after some discussion, we agreed two things. One was that any of the ideas we came up with in that discussion, either of us could use, because they were only ideas after all. And the other was that there was no way on God’s good earth that the two of us could ever collaborate on anything, because the styles of working simply would not interlock.

  Nobody ever taught me to write. No one ever told me what I was doing wrong. My first novel was published by the first publisher I sent it to. And so I’ve been learning as I go, and I find it now rather embarrassing that people beginning the Discworld series start with The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which I don’t think are some of the best books to start with. This is the author saying this, folks. Do not start at the beginning with Discworld.