from
A Slip of the Keyboard
Collected Nonfiction by
Terry Pratchett

There is a fury to Terry Pratchett’s writing. It’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld, and you will discover it here: it’s the anger at the headmaster who would decide that six-year-old Terry Pratchett would never be smart enough for the eleven-plus, anger at pompous critics, and at those who think that serious is the opposite of funny, anger at his early American publishers who could not bring his books out successfuly.

The anger is always there, an engine that drives. By the time this book enters its final act, and Terry learns he has a rare, early-onset form of Alzheimer’s, the targets of his fury change: now he is angry with his brain and his genetics and, more than these, furious at a country that will not permit him (or others in a similarly intolerable situation) to choose the manner and the time of their passing.

And that anger, it seems to me, is about Terry’s underlying sense of what is fair and what is not.

The authorial voice in these essays is always Terry’s: genial, informed, sensible, dryly amused. I suppose that, if you look quickly and are not paying attention, you might, perhaps, mistake it for jolly.

But beneath any jollity, there is a foundation of fury. Terry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise. [...] And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking hand in hand into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity.

Or, to put it another way, anger is the engine that drives him, but it is the greatness of spirit that deploys that anger on the side of the angels, or beter yet for all of us, the orangutans.

In the bad old typewriter days all you had to occupy yourself with when creativity flagged was sharpening the pencils and cleaning out the e with a pin. But with the word processor there’re endless opportunities for fiddling, creative writing of macros, meticulous resetting of the real-time clock, and so forth: all good honest work.

Sitting in front of a keyboard and a screen is work. Thousands of offices operate on this very principle.

SUSURRATION

. . . from the Latin susurrus, “whisper” or “rustling,” which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a hushed noise. But it hints of plots and secrets and people turning to one another in surprise. It’s the noise, in fact, made just after the sword is withdrawn from the stone and just before the cheering starts.

A good diet is essential, of course, as is a daily regime of exercise. Pay attention to your footwork, it will often get you out of trouble. Go down to the gym every day—every day of your life that finds you waking up capable of standing. Take every opportunity to watch a good professional fight. In fact watch as many bouts as you can, because you can even learn something from the fighters who get it wrong. Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do. And don’t forget the diet and the exercise and the roadwork.

Got it? Well, becoming a writer is basically exactly the same thing, except that it isn’t about boxing.

They weighed my wallet and found it was far too heavy for a man of my age and off I went for an angiogram, where they look at your heart via your groin. Now, the heart and groin are sometimes linked in other ways, but it did seem to me they were taking the long route. They give you a little something which makes you a wee bit sleepy and, hey, you are allowed to watch the operation on television.

They said, “Is there any particular music you would like to listen to?” And I said, “Well, I hadn’t thought about it, really. Er. . . you got some Jim Steinman?” And they said, “Sure,” put on Bat Out of Hell, and got on with the job. I was watching what they were doing and there was my heart on the screen, and I realized I was nodding off and I thought, “But this is so cool! The last thing I’m seeing is my heart, still beating!”

My next book out is Going Postal. It’s about a fraud, a criminal, a con man, who to some extent becomes redeemed through the book, and learns that in addition to fooling everybody else that he’s a nice guy, he can even fool himself. And a friend of mine who read a draft copy said, “There is a little bit of autobiography in all books, isn’t there?” Only friends will tell you that.

[...] there’s something about spending a lot of time with engineers that makes you burst out laughing when you hear the term “three completely independent fail-safe systems.” I learned all about the “Fred Factor.”

It works like this. Someone decides we’ll have a nuclear power station and they call in leading technical architects, and they design it. Subsystems are designed by competent engineers and sub-subsystems are designed by equally competent engineers and so it goes down and down and then you get to Fred. Fred is not a bad person, or even a bad workman. He is just an innocent victim of other people’s assumptions.

Fred has been given a job sheet and some tools and told he’s got an hour to do the task. Fred has got to wire up three, as it might be, completely independent fail-safe systems and he wires them up and they are indeed completely independent except for one crucial wire from each system which must go through the wall and into the control room. And Fred sits there thinking, “Why should I drill three holes when one will clearly do?” So he takes out his drill and he drills one hole through the wall and he runs all the wires through it and he positions them just under the Acme Sharp-Edged Shelving System, in a bay where a very small truck is shunting goods around and backing up an awful lot and good heavens, one day all three systems fail at once. That’s a terrible surprise, even to Fred.

The Net is still new, and it is big and it is public, and has brought with it new perceptions and problems. (One minor one is that people are out driving their language on a worldwide highway without passing a test. Take the word plagiarize. I know what it means. You know what it means. Lawyers certainly know what it means. But I have seen it repeatedly used as a synonym for research, parody, and reference, as in “Wyrd Sisters was plagiarized from Shakespeare.” That was a book of mine and, yes, well, it certainly does add to the enjoyment if you’ve heard of a certain Scottish play and . . . er . . . where do I start?)

Now add to this the growth of strange ideas about copyright. At one end of the spectrum I get nervous letters asking “Will it be all right if I name my cat after one of your characters?” At the other are the e-mails like: “I enjoyed the story so much that I’ve scanned it in and put it on my Web page . . . hope you don’t mind.” Copyright is either thought to exist in every single word, or not at all.

Steer clear of “thee” and “thou” and “waxing wroth” unless you are a genius, and use adjectives as if they cost you a toenail. For some reason adjectives cluster around some works of fantasy. Be ruthless.

And finally: the fact that it is a fantasy does not absolve you from all the basic responsibilities. It doesn’t mean that characters needn’t be rounded, the dialogue believable, the background properly established, the plots properly tuned.

Fantasy should present the familiar in a new light—I try to do that on Discworld. It’s a way of looking at the here and now, not the there and then. Fantasy is the Ur-literature, from which everything else sprang—which is why my knuckles go white when toe-sucking literary critics dismiss it as “genre trash.” And, at its best, it is truly escapist.

But the point about escaping is that you should escape to, as well as from. You should go somewhere worthwhile, and come back the better for the experience.

Tolkien’s great achievement was to reclaim fantasy as a genre that could be published for and read by adults. Traditionally, we had left the journey to the kids, who rather enjoyed it and found it easy. Adults got involved only to the extent that some teachers carefully picked up any “escapist rubbish” the child was currently reading and dropped it in the bin. There are still, even now, some of those around—I believe a special circle of hell is reserved for them. Of course fantasy is escapist. Most stories are. So what? Teachers are not meant to be jailers.

Escapism isn’t good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested. The fantasy books led me on to mythology, the mythology led painlessly to ancient history . . . and I quietly got an education, courtesy of the public library.

We categorize too much on the basis of unreliable assumption. A literary novel written by Brian Aldiss must be science fiction, because he is a known science fiction writer; a science fiction novel by Margaret Atwood is literature because she is a literary novelist. Recent Discworld books have spun on such concerns as the nature of belief, politics and even of journalistic freedom, but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.

This is not, on the whole, a complaint. But as I have said, it seems to me that dragons are not really the pure quill of fantasy, when properly done. Real fantasy is that a man with a printing press might defy an entire government because of some half-formed belief that there may be such a thing as the truth.

We look around and see foreign policies that are little more than the taking of revenge for the revenge that was taken in revenge for the revenge last time. It’s a path that leads only downwards, and still the world flocks along it. It makes you want to spit. The dinosaurs were thick as concrete, but they survived for 150 million years and it took a damn great asteroid to knock them out. I find myself wondering now if intelligence comes with its own built-in asteroid.

Of course, as the aforesaid writer of humorous fantasy I’m obsessed by wacky, zany ideas. One is that rats might talk. But sometimes I’m even capable of weirder, more ridiculous ideas, such as the possibility of a happy ending. Sometimes, when I’m really, really wacky and on a fresh dose of zany, I’m just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we’ve tried everything else.

Not long ago I was invited to a librarians’ event by a lady who cheerfully told me, “We like to think of ourselves as information providers.” I was appalled by this want of ambition; I made my excuses and didn’t go. After all, if you have a choice, why not call yourselves Shining Acolytes of the Sacred Flame of Literacy in a Dark and Encroaching Universe? I admit this is hard to put on a button, so why not abbreviate it to: librarians?

The people at the National said they didn’t want me to see them until the play had been sufficiently tuned. They also made it abundantly clear that I had no say in the production.

The reason for this, apparently, is that “writing a play is different from writing a book.” This is true: it’s different, and is, I suggest, easier. The playwright has got sound, light, movement and music—and a lot of staff—as part of their palette; the book author has one lousy alphabet. And we don’t get previews to help us tighten the work; we give it our best shot, press the send key, and pray.

I like hats. They give me something to do with my head.

In my family the men go bald in their twenties, to get it over with. It stops it coming as a nasty shock later in life. But it means that there’s nothing there to absorb all those bumps and scratches that the hairy people never even notice.

Aha, people say, it’s like some kind of prop, right? A magic mask? You think you become a real person when you put your hat on? You are the hat, right?

And that just goes to show why people shouldn’t go aroiund saying “Aha” and getting their psychology from bad movies. No, I don’t become a real person with the hat on. I become an unreal person with the hat on. There’s this man who’s sold twenty-five million books and goes on huge and gruelling signing tours and has seen the inside of too many hotel rooms. He’s the one under the hat.