Ulice Ankh-Morpork

QbaJak

sciagnąłem z ruskiej strony http://pratchett.ru/terry/interview.shtml, wywiad w 2 jezykach (ruski + angielski) dzieki czemu dostepny dla wiekszosci z nas..... mysle ze warto poczytac

Ответы Терри Пратчетта на вопросы посетителей нашего сайта.
От 9 февраля 2004 года.

Q: What character is the most alike you? What characteristics did he (or she :))

inherit from you?
Q: Какой персонаж более всего похож на вас? И какие черты он(она) от вас унаследовал(а)?

A: I suppose they must all have a part of me in them -- I'd be happy if Sam Vimes was most like me. But they are all fictional, and I am not.
A: Я думаю, во всех есть часть меня -- я был бы счастлив, если бы Сэм Ваймс был больше всего похож на меня. Но все персонажи выдуманы, а я нет.

Q: Is Discworld sometimes more real than our world for you?
Q: Кажется ли вам иногда Плоский Мир более реальным?

A: No. Fantasy authors have to keep a firm grip on reality.
A: Нет. Авторам фэнтези приходится твердо держаться за реальность.

Q: Do you really like rock-music, and if so, what namely?
Q: Вы действительно любите рок-музыку? Если да, то какую?

A: I like pretty much everything except rap. I was always a big fan of Jim Steinman and Meatloaf.
A: Я люблю много всего, за исключением рэпа. Всегда был большим поклонником Джима Стейнмана и Meatloaf.

Q: What's the main praise for you as the author?
Q: Какая для вас главная похвала как для автора?

A: When I get a letter from a young person saying that Discworld got them reading. That's great praise.
A: Когда я получаю письмо от юного человека, в которым говорится, как его увлек Плоский Мир. Это великая похвала.

Q: Do people or events inspire you in your work? Could you tell some about them?
Q: Вдохновляют ли вас люди или события? Расскажете о них?

A: I don't think they do, exactly. I've always read a lot, I watch people, I take an interest in world affairs...and out of this, somehow, stories come.
A: Не думаю, что это именно так. Я всегда много читаю, наблюдаю за людьми, интересуюсь мировыми событиями и из этого каким-то образом рождаются истории.

Q: What'd you think about Russia? Are you planning to visit our country? :-)

Q: Что вы думаете о России? Не собираетесь ли посетить?

A: I don't have any plans. They'll probably be made for me. All my trips abroad these days are signing tours -- I don't have the time for anything else. I'd like to visit one day, preferably in the summer!
A: У меня нет никаких планов. Возможно, они будут для меня созданы. Все мои поездки заграницу - это туры по раздаче автографов -- нет времени на что-то еще. Хотел бы посетить однажды, лучше летом.

Q: If you could live in Ankh-Morpork, what guild would you prefer? And what's your favorite place on the Disc?
Q: В какой гильдии АМ вы бы состояли? Ваше любимое место на Диске?

A: Well, the Assassin's Guild has the best chef...but the Seamstresses Guild has the best company.
A: В Гильдии Убийц лучший шеф-повар, но в Гильдии Швей лучшая компания.
A: I like writing about Lancre. I like small places.
A: Я люблю писать о Ланкре, мне нравятся маленькие места.

Q: What's the reason of your such a, e-er, strange attitude to elves and unicorns? Don't you think it can push away some, for example, Tolkien fans?
Q: Какова причина вашего, скажем так, странного отношения к эльфам и единорогам? Не думаете ли вы, что это оттолкнет, к примеру, фанатов Толкина?

A: Why? The elves in Lords and Ladies are very close to the traditional elves of NW European folklore , who were not particularly nice. They could sometimes be helpful, but they were best avoided.
A: Почему же? Эльфы в "Дамах и Господах" очень близки к традиционным эльфам северо-западного европейского фольклора, которые не были особенно милыми. Они могли порой быть полезными, но лучше было избегать их.
A: As for unicorns, well, they're a big horse with a horn. A full stallion is a fairly impressive and sometimes aggressive beast. I decided to make the unicorn ...real.
A: Что касается единорогов, это, собственно, большая лошадь с рогом. Взрослый жеребец - довольно-таки впечатляющий, и порой агрессивный зверь. Я решил сделать единорогов.. реальными.

Q: What's your opinion about "Wyrd Sisters" and "Soul Music" cartoons?
Q: Что вы думаете о мультфильмах "Вещие сестрички" и "Роковая музыка"?

A: They were very good for the budget they had. I liked the scripts -- they were done with some care. And the music for Soul Music was wonderful.
A: Для их бюджета они очень хороши. Мне понравился сценарий - он сделан с заботой. А саундтрек "Роковой музыки" был бесподобен.

Q: How'd you think, is it possible to film your books in anime genre?
Q: Как вы думаете, возможно ли экранизировать ваши книги в жанре аниме?

A: I doubt it! I don't see DW turning up on the big screen.
A: Сомневаюсь! Не могу представить Плоский Мир на большом экране.

Q: What things you dislike most?
Q: Что вы не любите больше всего?

A: Bureaucracy . It's the curse of Western society. We used to build things, create things. Now we compile statistics.
A: Бюрократию. Это проклятие всего западного общества. Мы создавали и строили, а теперь лишь собираем статистику.

Q: Where have you found such a good agent?
Q: Где вы нашли такого хорошего агента?

A: He used to be my publisher.
A: Он был моим издателем.

Взятие интервью и его перевод © 2004 Flack.
Полная или частичная публикация материала без согласия авторов запрещена.

QbaJak · Wysłany: 7 Marzec 2004, 11:47

Przerzucam tutaj coby sie bałagan nie zrobił

Nie wiem kiedy wywiad powstał ale znalazłem go w książce obecnie dostępnej w Empiku, wiec na początek trochę reklamy nie zaszkodzi:

Dominika Masterska „Stacja Kontroli Chaosu”
książka wydana przez Niezależną oficynę wydawniczą NOWA sp. z o.o.
pod patronatem „Nowej Fantastyki”
(na okładce piękny żółwik sunący przez kosmos Wink)

TERRY PRATCHETT (rzecznik prasowy elektrowni atomowych)
„Żółwiem przez pustkę”

- Pana pisarstwo jest często określone mianem fantastyki komicznej. Czy zgadza się pan z tym określeniem

- Nie lubię określenia „fantastyka komiczna” sam chętnie mówię o „fantastyce zdekonstruowanej”, kieruję swoje książki do ludzi, którzy dobrze znają klasyczne fantasy i zdążyli już poznać poetykę tego gatunku. Czytelnicy, którzy wiedzą czego można się spodziewać po książkach o czarodziejach i goblinach teraz chętnie poczytaliby o „dekonstruowaniu” klasycznego modelu, pobawiliby się konwencją fantsy.

- Sądząc po liczbie pana wielbicieli, takich znudzonych czytelników wciąż przybywa. Czy świadczy to o wyczerpaniu się gatunku fantasy?

- Niekoniecznie. Myślę jednak, że klasyczne fantasy za bardzo odbiega od naszego codziennego doświadczenia, żeby prosperować w ambiwalentnym świecie końca XX wieku. W rzeczywistości kreowanej przez klasyczne książki gatunku – na przykład u Tolkiena – najważniejsze nie są elfy czy krasnoludy, ale fakt że zawsze wiadomo, kto jest dobry, a kto zły, że wiemy którędy przebiega linia między białym i czarnym. W dzisiejszych czasach zbyt często spotykamy się z sytuacjami, gdy ktoś czy coś jest jednocześnie i dobre, i złe, nie wierzymy w kosmos jasnych podziałów. To po pierwsze. Po drugie, styl klasycznych fantasy brzmi, zwłaszcza dla młodych czytelników, bardzo sztucznie. W świecie jaki znają, nikt nie walczy ze smokami i nikt nie wita się okrzykiem w rodzaju „Hej gospodarzu, dwa kufle waszego najprzedniejszego piwa, a chyżo”. Mówimy raczej „Cześć”. W moich książkach naśladuję współczesny styl – nie tylko mówienia, ale i życia. Staram się przybliżyć fantastykę naszemu doświadczeniu.

- Płaski świat spoczywa na głowach słoni stojących na skorupie gigantycznego żółwia nie wydaje się zbyt bliski naszemu doświadczeniu

- To prawda, takie wyobrażenie ¦wiata Dysku zaczerpnąłem akurat z mitologii. Pamiętam, dziwiło mnie zawsze, w jak wielu różnych, niezależnych od siebie systemach religijnych występuje motyw żółwia płynącego przez pustkę, na którego skorupie spoczywa świat. Pisząc Kolor Magii – pierwszy tom ¦wiata Dysku – spróbowałem w pewien sposób urzeczywistnić ten obraz. W powieściach o ¦wiecie Dysku próbuje traktować mity poważnie jakby były faktami, a nie wierzeniami uświęconymi przez tradycję. Próbuję patrzeć na nie nowymi jakby „naiwnymi” oczyma współczesnych młodych ludzi. W ten sposób fantasy staje się prawdziwsza.

- Mógłby pan podać jakiś przykład? W jaki sposób sprawia pan, że tekst staje się „prawdziwszy”?

- Na przykład proszę pomyśleć o miastach. W bardzo wielu książkach fantasy znajdzie pani opis grodów, do których zdążają pielgrzymi, które są oblężone czy zrównane z ziemią podczas wojen krasnoludów. Ja postanowiłem zastanowić się w swoich książkach, jak miasto fantasy naprawdę funkcjonuje – prawdziwe miasto: z wodociągami, kanalizacją, ludźmi pijącymi herbatę i naprawiającymi dachy: z ludźmi, którzy samodzielnie myślą, nie tylko rozgrywają sceny w rodzaju bójki w karczmie. Chciałem wymyślić sobie taki świat, który można zaludnić współczesnymi bohaterami, jedynie z pozoru przypominającymi postaci fantasy – takie jak na przykład czarodzieje.

- Już kilkanaście lat pisze pan kolejne tomy powieści należących do cyklu ¦wiata Dysku. Dlaczego nie może pan rozstać się ze swoimi bohaterami

- Wymyśliłem Cały Wielki ¦wiat, zupełnie prawdziwy i fascynujący, a takiego świata się nie można po prostu zostawić własnemu losowi. Kolejne książki rozgrywające się na Dysku to nie są squele – dalsze ciągi przygód znanych już bohaterów, ale nowe opowieści. Nie odpowiadam w nich na pytanie, co było dalej, ale co wydarzyło się kiedy indziej.

- Nie boi się pan zacząć powtarzać samego siebie?

- Nie. Jedynym co łączy te wszystkie książki jest fakt, że rozgrywają się one na dysku. Jestem pewien, że napisano tysiące książek rozgrywających się w Warszawie a nikt nie traktuje ich jako całości. Często zdarza mi się mieć pomysł na fabułę rozgrywającą się poza Dyskiem, po pewnym czasie, po pewnym czasie dochodzę jednak do wniosku, że jeśli osadzę akcję tej książki gdzie indziej, popełnię oszustwo, bo tak naprawdę to jest książka ze ¦wiata Dysku, tylko tam jest tak niesamowicie, a zarazem zabawnie.

- Czas poważnej fantastyki więc się skończył?

- Tego nie powiedziałem. Fantastyka zabawna nie musi być wcale „niepoważna”. Przeciwieństwem rzeczy „śmiesznych” są rzeczy „nieśmieszne” a nie „niepoważne”. Moim zdaniem w żartach można czasem powiedzieć więcej poważnych rzeczy niż w kazaniu. I zostać wysłuchanym.

- Jaką fantasy czyta pan sam, tak dla przyjemności?

- Żadnej, przynajmniej w tej chwili. Kiedy byłem mały przeczytałem „Władcę Pierścieni” i kilka innych klasycznych pozycji gatunku, ale książki fantasy nigdy nie prowadziły w moich lekturach. W czasach gdy byłem dzieckiem, fantasy po prostu nie było bardzo mało. Trudno mi nawet powiedzieć w jaki sposób sam zacząłem pisywać tego rodzaju literaturę, mopje teksty „same” stawały się coraz bardziej fantastyczne. Natomiast jeśli chodzi o książki, które czytuję dla przyjemności, to rzadko kiedy jest to fikcja – wolę literaturę popularno naukową, często skaczę po rozmaitych dziedzinach wiedzy. Uwielbiam historię, ostatnio dużo czytam o przeszłości Dzikiego Zachodu, nie mam przy tym na myśli westernów, ale prawdę – relacje o tym, jak się tam żyło.

- Dlaczego w tak wielu swoich książkach odwołuje się pan do rozmaitych mitologii i legend

- Ponieważ dobrze znane motywy mitologiczne wciąż są w stanie nas zaskoczyć, jeśli tylko przyjrzeć się im dokładniej, jeśli odrzucimy stereotypowe opnie. Weźmy na przykład Piramidy, moją powieść o niby-Egipcie ukrytym wśród pustyń ¦wiata Dysku. Nawiązuję w niej do egipskiej religii i pradawnych wierzeń dlatego, że zafascynował mnie system religijny oparty na podróżach w czasie. Moim zdaniem, to co nazywamy piramidą, to nic innego jak wehikuł czasu – Egipcjanie wielkim nakładem wysiłku budowali go dla swojego zmarłego faraona, po to, by uciekł on czasowi, który niszczy zwykłych śmiertelników. Cała cywilizacja, cały naród żył budowaniem piramid, ich egzystencja nie była niczym innym niż próbą realizacji absurdalnej idei. To dopiero jest dla mnie niewiarygodne – w książkach ¦wiata Dysku próbuję więc pokazać, jak dziwną planetą jest nasza Ziemia, ile zagadek ukrywa. Co innego wiedzieć, że nad Nilem stoją piramidy, a co innego zastanowić się nad nimi – właśnie do tego próbuję zmusić czytelników.

- W Piramidach główny bohater patrzy na kraj swoich przodków ziemskimi oczyma?

- Oczyma zdrowego rozsądku. Pomyślałem sobie, że z kraju takiego jak starożytny Egipt wystarczy wyjechać na trochę – tak to się stało z synem faraona wysłanym do szkół – żeby zrozumieć, że wyznawana tam mitologia to skostaniały rytuał, który nas więzi, ponieważ powtarzamy go bez przerwy. Właśnie taka przerwa pozwala na odrobinę zastanowienia – po co nam więcej piramid? Może raczej założyć kanalizację?

- Myśli pan, że czas mitów, tak jak Tolkienowskiego ¦ródziemia, skończył się bezpowrotnie?

- Tworzymy wciąż nowe mitologie i wciąż dajemy się im złapać w pułapkę, pozwalamy by kierowały naszym postępowaniem i dyktowały nam, co jest dobre, a co złe. Żyjemy w rzeczywistości, w której Myszkę Mickey rozpoznaje więcej osób niż prezydenta Stanów Zjednoczonych, o laureatach nagrody Nobla już nie wspomnę.

- Zawsze z niechęcią wypowiada się pan o amerykańskim przemyśle filmowym. Czy jakaś pańska książka została zekranizowana?

- Tak, ale nie w Ameryce. Dwie moje powieści Trzy Wiedźmy i Muzyka Duszy mają już swoje wersje animowane. Muszę przyznać, że praca nad tymi filmami sprawiła mi bardzo dużo radości, pilnowałem też, żeby nie wpuścić na plan nikogo z Ameryki. Nie chciałem, by te powieści straciły swój oryginalny charakter, by nabrały Disnejowskiego charakteru, a Amerykanie filmowcy zawsze próbują upodobnić każdą fabułę do dominującej za oceanem sztampy.

- Czy pisząc swoje powieści wyobraża pan sobie bohaterów takimi, jak ich rysuje Josh Kirby?

- Nie. Josh ma cudowny styl i szalone pomysły i jest przede wszystkim świetnym autorem okładek – dzięki współpracy z nim moje książki są graficznie rozpoznawalne, co mnie bardzo cieszy. Jednak pisząc nie mogę wzorować się na jego ilustracjach, bo efektem byłaby „fanstastyka-zupełnie-zdekonstruowana”, a tego nie dałoby się czytać.

- Mówiliśmy przed chwilą o cytatach z mitologii w pańskich książkach. Chciałabym wrócić do tego tematu. Czytuje pan również klasykę literacką, zwłaszcza Szekspira – dlaczego?

- To co mnie zawsze intrygowało w „klasyce” literatury – we wszystkich listach lektur i kanonach – to fakt, jak wiele opowieści, które znamy tak dobrze, że się nad nimi nie zastanawiamy, nie ma większego sensu. Proszę się na przykład zastanowić nad tragiczną historią Romea i Julii. To przecież para dzieciaków, którym trzeba dać po dobrym klapsie i powiedzieć: „Nie traktujcie wszystkiego tak śmiertelnie poważnie”. Bohaterowie wielkich tragedii widziani oczyma dzisiejszych nastolatków żyją w niepotrzebnym napięciu, przekonani że wiele się nie da zrobić. Tymczasem wystarczyłaby odrobina inicjatywy i wszystko potoczyłoby się inaczej. Gdyby Romeo ukradł na przykład parę szybkich koni, mogliby sobie gdzieś uciec i zacząć nowe życie. Czy chcemy, czy nie chcemy, takie rzeczy przychodzą do głowy dzisiejszym „przymusowym” czytelnikom Szekspira, a ja próbuję w moich książkach przeprowadzić drobny eksperyment i zastanowić się jak to by było gdyby Romeo ukradł te konie. Tak rodzą się nowe opowieści, która nie są powtórzeniem starych wątków, ale efektem przeczytania kilku książek i zastanowienia się nad nimi.

- Co poradziłby pan ludziom, którzy sami chcieliby zostać pisarzami fantasy?

- Przestańcie na jakiś czas czytać fantasy, zaczekajcie, aż zapomnicie o cudzych słowach i dopiero wtedy bierzcie się za konstruowanie własnych fabuł. Moi fani przysyłają mi często własne próby „literackie”. Ich zadaniem jest to fantasy, klasyczna czy też „zdekonstruowana”, a ja widzę, że te teksty to zmiksowane i pozszywane fragmenty Tolkiena, Eddingsa, czy mnie samego. Nie tędy droga.

- Pisarstwo fantasy polega więc na znajdowaniu fascynujących informacji dotyczących naszej rzeczywistości i „przekładaniu” ich na język fikcji?

- To nie jest takie proste. Przepisanie tysiąca interesujących tekścików z tysiąca autentycznych źródeł nic nie da. Istnieje przecież coś takiego jak talent literacki, zdolność budowania metafor... Moim zdaniem pisarzem zostaje się w momencie, kiedy ktoś zaczyna czytać nasze książki, słowa, które napisaliśmy. Pisarz, nawet genialny, nie jest pisarzem, jeśli nikt nie zna jego dzieł, bo słowo jest naprawdę napisane dopiero w momencie odczytania, tak samo jak ciastko staje się naprawdę ciastkiem dopiero kiedy ktoś je zjada.

- Ma pan reputacje pisarza niezwykle płodnego – skąd biorą się te wszystkie tomy, skąd aż tyle pomysłów?

- Kiedy ludzie dziwią się, jak to możliwe, że piszę każdą swoją powieść w nie więcej niż sześć miesięcy, odpowiadam: napisanie tej książki zajęło mi pól roku pisania i czterdzieści lat, przez które obserwowałem innych, oglądałem filmy i czytałem.

- A pańska kariera dziennikarza? Czy lata spędzone w tym zawodzie nauczyły pana czegoś, co przydaje się Pratchettowi – pisarzowi fantasy?

- Oczywiście. Przede wszystkim dziennikarz to ktoś, kto pisze ciągle i dużo, komu składanie zdań przychodzi odruchowo, nie jest żadnym problemem. Poza tym, piszący dziennikarz na co dzień współpracuje z redaktorami – widzi własne teksty zmieniane, skracane albo wydłużane i przestaje traktować każde napisane przez siebie zdanie, jak świętość, rozumie, że teksty wymagają obróbki. Po trzecie i najważniejsze, dziennikarz spotyka bardzo wielu rozmaitych ludzi i dużo z nimi rozmawia – uczy się słuchać i wyciągać wnioski.

- Czy to prawda, że pracował pan niegdyś jako rzecznik prasowy elektrowni atomowej?

- Czterech elektrowni atomowych. To niepewna posada, one ciągle wybuchają... Tak, spędziłem osiem lat jako rzecznik i naoglądałem się niemało – zwłaszcza współpraca z politykami dostarczyła mi bezcennego materiału do książek fantasy.[/b]

QbaJak

dorzucam jeden

Interview with Terry Pratchett about The Amazing Maurice

1. What did you read when you were in your teens?

I started out, as so many do, by reading all the sf I could get my hands on. And (as also happens a lot, although it's seldom acknowledge) the interest in reading that sf had awakened let me to read my way through the whole of the local public library. The one thing I didn't read in my teens was books for teens.

2. What first put the idea into your head that you would rewrite the story of the Pied Piper?

I came up with the book title a long time ago, and it became just a one-line gag in an adult Discworld book. Then one day I just sat down and thought had about it and, being me, got hold of every book about rats I could find. I thought it was going to be a simple little fun story that'd take me a couple of months to write. Boy, was I wrong...

3. Discworld plots are fast, furious and knotty! When you begin writing, do you know where your going, or do you have to let Discworld take control and see where it takes you?

I'm not sure about the 'furious and knotty'! And the answer deserves with one sentence or an essay. I'll try to summarise it like this: writing, for me, is a little like wood carving. You find the lump of tree (the big central theme that gets you started) and you start cutting the shape that you think you want it to be. But you find, if you do it right, that the wood has a grain of its own (characters develop and present new insights, concentrated thinking about the story opens new avenues) and if you're sensible you work with the grain and, if you come across a knot hole, you incorporate that into the design. A lot of things in Maurice 'weren't there' when I started; it'd be more true to say, though, that they were there, inherent in the basic story outline, and emerged as I worked through draft Zero, the one I write for myself to tell me how the story goes. This is not the same as 'making it up as you go along'; it's a very careful process of control.

4. "There's no subtext, no social commentary," complains Malicia about "Mr Bunnsy." Fantasy is often thought of as escapism, but is it escapism with a firm root in reality?

Well, Malicia is a very knowing girl. She reads a lot. She's aware of the things we try to foist on kids via their reading. Fantasy IS escapism, but wait...why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G K Chesterton summarised the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that *once again* we see it for the first time and realise how marvellous it is. Sure, there's a lot of rubbish produced for kids, usually in order to get them to buy the merchandising, but fantasy per se -- the ability to envisage this world in many different ways -- is one of the skills that makes us human.

5. As a writer, do you spend too much time in Discworld to really enjoy other writers' fantasy worlds, or are there other favorite worlds that you enjoy escaping to?

To paraphrase Captain James T. Kirk: no, I live in this world, I only *work* in Discworld! I do read enough to keep up with the genre but, in truth, a great deal of my reading these days if either non-fiction or right outside the genre, which is as it should be.

6. 'Maurice' is set in Discworld, which has already seen 26 adult books, yet it's aimed at a younger market. Why?

In truth, it's aimed in theory at older children but in reality I'm quire sure that a lot of the adult readers will buy it. I already have quite a lot of cross-over readers, and I have written seven independent childrens/YA titles. A lot of authors who have created a successful series tend, eventually, to franchise it. I've franchise DW, but to myself: I've decided to try new things with it. 'Maurice' is 'canonical' with the adult series -- it's clearly in the same world -- but writing it specifically for children offers me new challenges and opportunities. One of them was to work harder on a book than I've ever worked before!

QbaJak

i drugi

oba zaczerpnięte z http://groups.msn.com/Add...tchettnews.msnw

THE WEE FREE MEN

- An interview with Terry Pratchett -

1. When you’re writing a new novel, do you "listen with your eyes" at the world about you, or does a character, or a voice come into your head? What happens to get you to sit down your desk and write the opening words of a new novel

"I’m not sure. I start with a handful of semi-formed ideas and play around with them until they seem to make some sense. Actually typing is important to me – it kind of tricks my brain into gear. I’ve got a packrat mind, like most writers, and once I starting thinking hard about a new project all kinds of odd facts and recollections shuffle forward to get a place on the bus."

2. When you were writing The Amazing Maurice, you did a good deal of research into rats and admitted that "I think I have read, in the past few months, more about rats than is good for me." Now, can you tell us a little about researching those Wee Free Men … and did you have to get "a wee bittie sloshed" to do it?

"Well, ‘no’ to that last question – I actually put some thought into giving the Feegles a language that sounded right, and you need to be sober for that! This time around I didn’t need to do a lot of primary research. It’d be more accurate to say I spent some time checking up to be absolutely certain about things that I remembered from my general reading over many years, like the Yan Tan Tethera (the shepherd’s counting system) and one or two old customs of the Chalk country. The Feegles were easy. They practically created themselves! I can’t stress this enough – the best research is probably the research you’re doing when you don’t think you’re doing research."

3. "[Tiffany] could put up with monsters. But she didn’t want to face mad boots." Do you have any particular – or peculiar - fears?

"When I was a kid I was scared rigid of skeletons. So maybe you don’t have to have taken Psychology 101 to see why, in the adult Discworld series, I’ve made the skeletal Death almost a gentle figure."

4. In The Wee Free Men, Tiffany comments that where she lives there are "a lot of people with a lot to do. There wasn’t enough time for silence." Would this be as fair a comment from you about life for us all today as it is for Tiffany in the Chalk?

"More so, I think. We’ve banished silence from our lives. We seem to fear it. We fill the world with noise. I’m sure it makes us ill.

"The silence up on the Chalk that I mention in the book—well, we get that where I live. It doesn’t mean no sound at all, though. You hear the buzzards and the wind in the hedgerows and tractor sounds a long way off, and all of this gives the silence a kind of texture, makes it richer somehow."

5. When you won the Carnegie Medal last year, you commented that "It’s nice to see humor taken seriously." (Actually, you probably commented that "It’s nice to see humour taken seriously" but …) Is writing YA novels something we can look forward to you continuing, and might we meet Tiffany, or any other characters again in future books?

"I’m playing with ideas for a sequel to TWFM, that’s certain. And that means the Feegles will be in it along with Tiffany. I’d like to follow her life for a while. But there are so many other things I want to do, too."

6. We note with admiration that in a UK national poll conducted by the BBC you have five titles in the list of 100 all-time ‘best loved’ books, the same number as Charles Dickens. Does that make you feel proud?

"A bit. And puzzled, too. It’s only 4.5 titles, though, since one is Good Omens and as far as I know Charles Dickens has never worked with Neil Gaiman. But P.G. Wodehouse isn’t in there, which is strange. Still it was a poll of people’s personal favorites, not the books they objectively considered ‘the best’, so if you don’t like the answer, maybe it’s because you’ve asked the wrong question.

"It’s interesting to try to work out what was going through the voters’ minds, though."

Black Dagger · Dołączył: 14 Lut 2004 Skąd: Kraków

A ja znalazłem następny, po angielsku, więc problemów nie będzie

Linda Richards: Was Thief of Time your 26th book?

Terry Pratchett: It was. And there have been two more since then.

This is the one that A.S. Byatt suggested should be nominated for the Booker Prize.

Yeah. And The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is up for a Carnegie Medal, and it won't get that either.

Was Thief of Time actually nominated for the Booker?

I heard [that] the judges called it in. Which is to say: Let's have a look. And that means one or two of the judges thought they should. But we never heard any more. Thank goodness, because I think my earnings would have gone down considerably if I suddenly got literary credibility. A friend of mine said: It would be impossible for you to win the Booker; all the stars would go out. The world is not constructed for that to happen.

For what? For Terry Pratchett to win the Booker Prize?

For a man who writes books with covers that look like that [He points to the whimsical UK cover of a copy of Thief of Time], who wears a leather jacket and says he writes fantasy and who believes he owes a debt to the science fiction/fantasy genre which he grew up out of, refuses to say he writes "magical realism" -- which is like a polite way of saying you write fantasy and is more acceptable to certain people -- and who, on the whole doesn't care that much. It's all stuff.

The best award I ever had -- and believe me, I've not had that many -- was in 1993 when the Writer's Guild of Great Britain voted the children's book Johnny and the Dead Children's Book of the Year. And the reason I was really pleased with that is that it was other writers who were voting. And so, therefor, I considered that book to be a masterpiece, in the proper mediaeval sense of the word.

We use the term "masterpiece" and don't understand what it means. But, in the old days of the guilds you'd become an apprentice carpenter, and then you'd become a journeyman and you were not allowed to call yourself a master until you had made -- to the satisfaction of the existing masters of the guild -- something that indicated you had sufficient skill to be considered to have mastered the art. And it might be a model piece of furniture or something but it was the master piece: the piece that you made to demonstrate that you had learned your trade.

Last year the [British] Bookseller's Association gave me a very strange award for Services to Booksellers. As a friend of mine -- I have friends like this -- said: That's like giving a painter an award for services to picture framers. But it's because I've been runner-up to Author of the Year for five years running and they thought: We'd better do something about this guy, for heaven's sake! He's too young to give him a Lifetime Achievement Award [Laughs]. And, you know, I have said: If anyone ever tries to give me a lifetime achievement award they'll have considerable difficulty swallowing on account of it being stuck in their throats.

I keep hearing that you're responsible for one per cent of all book sales in the UK.

To be honest, I don't know. The thing is that there was a recent list of the top 10 science fiction and fantasy titles in the UK. I had number one and number two. The sales of number -- I forget which title it was -- were more than the sales of numbers three to ten totaled. And I think I had a third book in there somewhere around number 10, and that was 30,000 in the year. And that was The Color of Magic, the first Discworld book. The reason I make the sales is that everything I've written is in print and still selling very well. And every new book adds to it and the whole huge thing just keeps rumbling onward.

Do you see it all of a piece: this world you're creating.

Yes. While being very careful not to suggest any comparison; everything that P.G. Wodehouse wrote more or less existed in the same world, it was the world of Wooster that you made your way into, rather than the specific stories. And I think Discworld works on that basis.

But, for you, does every book sort of fit into your own master piece, as it were? Do you see it as each one contributing to the whole that you're building?

It's an interesting thought. I don't know: you'd better ask me when I've finished. And since I don't intend to finish before I'm dead, this may involve the services of some good medium. My best books, I believe, have been written for children. Like the Johnny Maxwell series [including Johnny and the Dead and Johnny and the Bomb] and The Amazing Maurice.

The Amazing Maurice is technically a Discworld book: it's set in Discworld, but it was written for children. ie: It's got war, murder, cannibalism and that kind of stuff -- genocide. All the kind of things that a good fairytale-based children's story should have. It's about rats. Rats are not rabbits. Rabbits go around having fun in the sunshine. Rats live down in the dirt. I've got that kind of sense of humor.

Writing for kids is really, really difficult if you do it properly. And so, a little book which is maybe 40,000 words long takes as long as a Discworld book which is two and a half times as long [in actual words].

What makes it more difficult?

Well, one obvious thing is, when you're writing a book for adults -- especially with the expectation that [some] of them at least will be familiar with the whole fantasy genre -- then some of your work has already been done for you. Adults posses their own film studio that will process that text into the movie.

Kids do to an extent, but you can never be quite certain how wide that extent is. So there has to be more care with every word. You can get more serious with kids. And kids are also prepared to accept any amount of weirdness if they think the story is fun. I'm talking about the average reading kid. OK, right: it's set a long way away and the rats can talk and so can the cat. And the kids are, like: Yeah, right. We know this stuff. We're familiar with this kind of territory. Just give us enough explanation for us to accept, for the moment, what it is you're, you know [trying to tell us]. And then, let's have some plot. You don't have to, particularly, give lots of backstory to some of your [characters]. Because think of the classic fairytale: In the middle of the forest lived the wicked witch. Fine. We accept that. We know forest, we know wicked witch. In fact, that's a particularly treacherous kind of fairytale because you're never given the evidence. Why was she wicked? How many ovens are big enough to push an entire adult human being into? I say that because I'm writing another children's book where a little girl is wondering about this.

"The princess was as beautiful as the day is long." Well, how long? Some days in the winter are really short. How come he's a handsome prince? Picture please. Who says she's a wicked witch? People don't like her? Why do they say she's wicked? Why is it you always find witches in the heart of the evil wood where the worst things happen? I mean, you find doctors where there are diseases, but you don't blame it on the doctors. So she's deconstructing the fairytales and coming up with her own conclusions because she's a kid that thinks for herself. And that's fun, and kids quite like that kind stuff as well.

The Amazing Maurice is a children's book?

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a Discworld book. It's set in Discworld, but it is for children. In fact, you can read it without knowing anything about Discworld, but for both children and adults that do know about Discworld, it has all the little markers in it that say: Yeah, this is Discworld all right. Like Death as a character and other things like that. But it's quite good fun, because when Death comes to Maurice, there's a kind of plea bargaining, because he's a cat, you see. When Maurice dies, he dies in an act of great bravery and then when Death comes for him, they kind of negotiate:

Well, how many have you got left now?

I've got five left.

I thought it was four, what about that car?

No, no: it was hardly a scratch.

That's exactly it.

But because he's a cat, you can afford to lose the occasional life.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on the Discworld book that comes out after the next one that comes out, which is called Nightwatch which comes out in November. Meantime I'm working on the next one after that, which is another Discworld children's book which is called The Wee Three Men and that's going to come out in the spring of next year.

And that's the one where the girl is questioning fairy stories?

Yes, Tiffany her name is. I chose her name because it was the least witch-like name I could think of only to find that when you go through some of the sounds associated with that name, it's an incredibly good name for my character. I couldn't possibly have known it when I chose the name. Tiffany is a name that in the UK we tend to associate with big hair and hairdressers and stuff. And yet the sounds in Gaelic means: land under water or land under waves. And in the context of the story it couldn't possibly have been a better name. [Laughs] And it's lovely when that happens. That's what I call a banker moment. When you think you're just rambling along, pulling a story together out of components and you suddenly find that it starts to speak to you.

Tell me about The Science of Discworld.

That's a book I wrote with a couple of scientists [Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen] which looks at our understanding of this world as thought it were Discworld. It's not like the science of Star Trek because, frankly, Star Trek has got no science. Let's reverse the polarity of electron flow and the shit will go backwards. And time, too, if it's required in this little episode. But Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart said: Look, the way most people think about science is exactly like the way people think in Discworld. So that's a good starting point for writing a popular science book using an especially written Discworld story to move the science along. And it worked very, very well and so we've done a sequel.

There have been lots of great Discworld tie-ins over the years, haven't there? Your books seem to inspire that in people. More and more and more Discworld!

There have been three computer games, a cookery book -- that was a lot of fun to do -- the four maps and every year there's a Discworld diary.

Television? Movies?

There have been two animations for televisions. Movies are a sore point. There's always things in development heck.

When I interviewed Neil Gaiman, he told me all about...

... Good Omens.

Good Omens. Yes. The whole nightmare about that.

And that really looks now as if it's disappearing back into development heck again because I believe [Terry] Gilliam's moved off of it because they haven't got all the money. And so, I don't know, they're looking at reformatting it and God knows. But for me that's the familiar sound of opportunity whizzing straight past.

Do your books give you the forum for a really good rant once in a while?

Like the auditors in Thief of Time. They are one side of a current theme in Discworld. Discworld is full of the personification of things like death and you've got the five horsemen of the apocalypse.

The worst thing is the personification of that which has no personality: the Auditors whose job it is to see that the universe works. And they hate living creatures because living creatures are random and they make a bid -- for want of a better word -- to take over. The fun part is that they do it by giving themselves bodies. And they recognize how bodies work, but they don't understand what being a human is like. They have no concept of taste. They can tell you absolutely every possible thing about chocolate except what it's like to eat chocolate. They have no concept of senses seen from the inside. There's one bit in a museum where they're trying to catalog the entire universe and they're dismantling works of art to find out what makes them works of art. They've reduced a painting to piles of pigment and they still can't find where the beauty is.

So, in terms of a place to rant, in a sense yes, because I can say some of the things I think. Fantasy potentially gives you a lot of good metaphors to consider, because most current affairs are only ubiquitous, everlasting affairs which turn up again and again in different disguises throughout history.

Do you find your books are becoming more thoughtful?

They're becoming darker and the humor now comes out of the character and situation rather than a gag in the plot. Some of the best humor turns up purely as a result of the development of the situation.

The mother of an autistic child wrote to me once and said: Did I have an autistic child or know any autistic children or was I mildly autistic. And I said: No, none of these as far as I'm aware. And I asked why. And she said that her son, who is autistic, sometimes asks her questions like: What do you call the hour after midnight? And she'd explain how the hour after midnight is now the next day. And he said: Yes but, if there was an hour after midnight, what do you call it? And I said: Well, no fantasy writer would have any difficulty with this concept whatsoever. A secret hour after midnight that you could only access in some special way. And I don't really think of that as autistic thinking. I don't really know what kind of thinking it is.

Certainly nonlinear.

Well, you might just simply call it whimsical thinking. But out of that kind of thinking something that isn't strictly whimsical can happen. English is a particularly good language for that kind of thinking. And it's certainly the kind of thinking you need to consider the higher mathematics these days. One you get to quantum physics, that kind of thinking isn't sufficient.

You said your books are getting darker.

Well, perhaps you could say more realistic. They're less clearly funny. Josh's [the late Josh Kirby] covers were very jolly and somewhat cartoony. I think the books over the last 10 books have gone slightly away from that. Because, if all you've got is the gags, you haven't got anything. There have to be bones under the flesh.

I think that's what Wyatt meant when he said that Thief of Time would be the one if one were to be nominated for The Booker Prize. Because there's some heavy thought in that book. It seemed to me more philosophical than earlier books. Like all of the thinking around time in this one...

But we talk about that stuff all the time. It is simply taking your metaphors seriously. We waste time, we lose time. It's like water in the Southwestern United States, it's exactly the same thing. We just move it about.

But Thief of Time seemed more thoughtful to me than earlier Pratchett books. Less pure hilarity.

I suppose so, but it's like wit and humor. Humor comes out of a deep soil. Humor puts down roots. Now wit: you can grow wit in a windowbox. And what Discworld now has is more humor, less wit. I didn't paste the jokes on top, but you could see them as part of the book. The point is, you have to develop one way or the other. I would not have the readership I have if I'd written effectively in terms of style, the same book 28 times.

But you're evolving as a person, as well.

Oh: I'm evolving as a person. [He mocks, self-deprecating.]

But you are. Of course you are.

What you're probably getting is the merest trace of the development of wisdom. I've noticed, for instance, that as you get older, you take less interest in pop groups. There's always another one of them along in a minute. It's not actually worth knowing the names because you've seen so many and on the whole, the music sometimes changes and every now and again one comes along that really impresses the world and you'll find out. But you realize that the same shit comes in different bottles. And also you find that you can deal with success. By the time you hit 50, you're either sort of comfortable with yourself or you're not. I'm not at all unhappy with that. | August 2002

Black Dagger · Dołączył: 14 Lut 2004 Skąd: Kraków

A tu jeszcze jeden:

Wywiad przeprowadzony z Terrym Pratchettem przez Lugigiego Pachi.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Terry, kiedy zacząłeś pisać fantastykę?
Zawsze lubiłem science-fiction i fantastykę. Zacząłem pisać w tych gatunkach jaszcze kiedy byłem dzieckiem.
2. Czy darzysz szczególną bliskością wydawcę, który opublikował twoją pierwszą powieść fantasy?
Hmm? Nie, nic podobnego. Ja tylko wysłałem kopię do wydawcy, a ona została przyjęta. Myślę, że było to około 1968 roku...
3. Skąd przyszedł szalony pomysł stworzenia tego fantastycznego świata?
Discworld nie jest szalonym światem. Albo bynajmniej porównany do naszego świata jest całkiem "rozsądny". Zaznaczam, że ¦wiat Dysku nie jest obłąkany, on tylko taki się wydaje!
4. Czy jednak jest jakiś szczególny powód dla którego zdecydowałeś się pisać fantastykę opartą na tych charakterystycznych postaciach? Czy być może poczułeś już niedosyt pisania fantasy na tych samych zasadach co większość współczesnych autorów?
Nie zamierzałem tego. Wierzę, że po prostu próbuję pisać w swoim stylu. Nie mam wielkich pomysłów w głowie, kiedy zaczynam te historie. Po prostu lubię pisać o tym, o czym lubię czytać.
5. Terry, czy myślisz, że jest różnica między twoją paradoksalną fantastyką, a powieściami science-fiction takich autorów jak Robert Sheckley, czy Douglas Adams?
Wierzę, że każdy z nas używa tak zwanego "humorystecznego gatunku" w swojej pracy. Różnice (kilka? wiele?) istniejące między nami są takie same jak u dowolnej innej grupy pisarzy.
6. Co jest głównym składnikem twoich powieści, sprawiającym że trafiają one zawsze na listę bestsellerów?
Ktoś kiedyś powiedział, że ludzie lubią mieszankę dobrego humoru i filozofii. Gdybym tego nie wiedział moje książki byłyby... hmm...
7. Filmy takie jak "Kosmiczne Jaja" Mela Brooksa, albo seriale telewizyjne w stylu "Czerwonego Krasnoluda" mogą zbliżyć ludzi bardziej do fantasyki, czy może twoim zdaniem są oglądane tylko przez małą grupkę widzów?
Jest wręcz przeciwnie. Te filmy i programy są oglądane przez miliony ludzi (przynajmniej w Anglii), ale nie jest to do końca science-fiction: generalnie jest tam tylko fantastyczna sceneria i niektóre wątki w stylu science-fiction.
8. Czy masz jakieś nowe plany na przyszłość?
Mnóstwo
9. A czy są wśród nich zamiary przeniesienia sagi ¦wiata Dysku na duży ekran?
Zawsze są jakieś propozycje, choć na razie nie bardzo przekonujące. W każdym razie kilka stacji telewizyjnych ma wkrótce przedstawić jakieś konkrety.
10. Niedawno w jakiejś gazecie czytałem, że jesteś już znudzony masą napływających informacji. Czy możesz wytłumaczyć naszym czytelnikom o co ci chodziło w tym stwierdzeniu?
Nie jestem znudzony. Po prosu jestem zażenowany tą całą gadaniną o sieci. Internet przyjmuje miano magicznego leku na wszystko. Na pewno Internet jest zabawny, ale zasadniczo to kolejna cholerna RZECZ. Przyszłość nie jest oparta na sieci. Dla mnie ktoś kto naprawdę chce zamówić pizzę przez Internet jest niemożliwie żałosny

I następny:

Let's talk about the latest book in the Discworld series, The Fifth Elephant, which will be released here in the United States in April, 2000. Have the release dates for the American and British dates been synchronized yet?

There have been various attempts in the past to do so. At one point, some years back, HarperCollins made what was then a sensible decision to leap forward in the series, skipping a few books in the series in order to "catch up"; later on, it could bring out ones that had been missed. But at least this way the new titles would be released at the same time as the ones in the U.K. Unfortunately, there was some slippage, and things ended up even worse off than they were before. But I think that things have gotten back into some kind of order now. Certainly, it is everyone's intention to bring the books out as closely together as is possible. In fact, for the very next book, my manuscript has gone off to HarperCollins and to Transworld in the U.K. at the same time. That would be The Truth, which will be out in November, 2000, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. So, there should be general rejoicing.

The Fifth Elephant brings back Captain Vimes and throws him in up to his neck in conspiracy, diplomacy, vampires and werewolves. Let's start with werewolves. Why werewolves?

Well, why not? Werewolves are -- I was going to say a
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very 20th century monster -- but possibly I now mean a very 21st century monster. But in order to really answer this question I must digress a bit. A lot of the humor (and possibly a lot of the power in the Discworld series) comes from thinking logically about those things which we don't normally think logically about, that we just accept. For example, in a horror story we just sort of accept the idea of werewolves and vampires without actually going a little deeper into it. It seemed to me that a thinking creature that spends part of its time as a wolf and part of its time as a human is going to be a very interesting creature, with a very interesting psychology. I invented a female werewolf who is a vegetarian as a human being, but nevertheless for one week per month is a wolf with everything that entails. Her name is Angua. It was fun to write Angua. I suppose it's a terrible thing for an author to say, but an author likes characters who are screwed up: Angua is screwed up, Granny Weatherwax is screwed up. They are not at ease with themselves, and that makes them fun for the author. That makes their heads very interesting places for the author to be. Angua is half a wolf and she's half a human; we have a word for something which is half a wolf and half a human and that's dog. And in a sense she is dog-like in her devotion and in her courage and so forth. I was having a lot of fun with Angua and then I thought, "What would a werewolf family be like? How would the genealogy of werewolves work? What would the politics of werewolves be?" One thing just led to the other, but they all started from the basic idea of thinking seriously about werewolves in a modern society, or what passes for a modern society.

Vimes gets into a great deal of trouble in this book. I especially liked the chase scene. It's sort of The Most Dangerous Game, but played out in the background of a Chekhov play.

Well, I'm glad you noticed that because I get fan mail from some of the younger fans and they say, "What was the bit with the three old ladies?" And I say, "Haven't you heard of Chekhov?" "Yes, wasn't he the first officer on the Enterprise. And I think, "Oh, dear me. I'm an old man, I'm going to have to kill myself!" In my story, it's not Chekhov really, but it's what people that don't know much about Chekhov think Chekhov is. I put that sequence in the story as sort of an Easter egg: the little treasures (literary or other jokes) hidden throughout the story. I didn't want to do just a straight chase scene, and I thought, "This is the right kind of landscape, it's the right kind of weather, so let's have a couple of pages of mock Chekhov." The nice thing about Discworld is you can do that kind of thing.

I wonder what percentage of the readership actually catch all the jokes? Perhaps each person gets a different Easter egg, so to speak.

That, I think, is one of the keys to the success of this world, although I never set out to do things like that. I don't think anyone gets everything. But I think nearly every one gets 80% - 90% of the references in the book. But I hope that the things that they don't get they don't notice that they're not getting, if you follow me. There is a character mentioned in the book, (although he's never appeared because he's dead) called Bloody Stupid Johnson, who is the opposite of a genius. He is kind of the negative image of Leonardo de Vinci. He's built various things which don't work, and they all failed to work in a most spectacular way. One of the things he built is the Mighty Organ at the Unseen University, which can make the most astonishing array of sounds. There is a scene in one of the books where one of my characters is at the Ankh-Morpork Opera house. The Opera House's organ has been busted and needs some spare parts. So the character says, "Well, I've been in touch with the University and it's a marvelous thing. It turns out that our organ is a Johnson." Now, no one in England is going to get that line, but most Americans probably will. But it doesn't actually matter to me that no one in England will, unless they've watched a few American movies, because they're not going to notice it. Ultimately I put those things in because I think it will be fun at that point.

The Igors ("ee-gors") are great fun. Or perhaps you call them Igors ("eye-gors")?

It seems to be pronounced both ways in the classic horror movies. I've always thought of them as "ee-gors". I rather like their philosophy, really. I'm so pleased with the Igors that I've made certain I've got one ready for a future book.

Another theme that makes for some great reading is what happens when two dissimilar cultures clash. Is that a theme you are interested in?

Well, yes. I can say to you that Ankh-Morpork is probably a cross between 17th century London and 20th century New York. Captain Vimes thinks like both the British and Americans think, i.e., you go to some other country but you bring with you your own cultural baggage. Despite the fact that Vimes really doesn't like people acting the way he himself is acting, nevertheless he still does it. He simply lays down the law. If you remember, there's a scene where he stands up for Detritus when they are in Überwald. Even though Detritus is a troll, Vimes is simply not going to have one of his officers treated as a second class citizen in a different country -- and that's that. He just puts it right on the line. And yet, at the same time, he makes a fool of himself. He gets it all wrong about the food. He's a little bit obscene. We can see in him aspects of ourselves, I think -- and of our own culture, I have to say.

Readers who are mystery fans are going to get a special kick out of this book. He's trying to solve this crime and then it turns into this dreadful political thing.

Right. I write what used to be called thrillers. The fun thing about writing something like this is that I know that a lot of the fans are trying to get ahead of me all the time. They're trying to get to the end of things -- to see where it's going. Vimes isn't daft, you know. When faced with an apparent crime of that nature, he immediately starts thinking of all the various possibilities. He doesn't take things at face value. Never mind about the destination; it's the journey that's going to be fun.

It seems to me that the Discworld novels have gotten a touch darker, perhaps with a few more serious bits in them. Is that an accurate statement of how the series has evolved?

First off, I have to say that I simply hate it when reviewers call my work "wacky" or "zany". Those people are going to be hunted down by the
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Mafia! Seriously, I suppose around the fifth or six Discworld book, I discovered the joy of plot. I think it was Esther Friesner who said you have to have tragic relief. If a book is nothing but funny, then it is nothing but funny. There is no contrast and it's hard to take anything seriously. It's hard to worry about the fate of a character. You do need those moments when you bring people down to Earth. I think the book which generated the most mail and email was Jingo. In Jingo, there was a theme of what you might call quantum confusion (and only in fantasy can you get away with this kind of thing). Vimes picks up his personal organizer just at the moment when the Universe is splitting into two. So that is the point where he picks up the personal organizer that belongs to the Vimes that makes the decision in a different way, so he gets a personal organizer which is effectively telling him what would have been happening in his life had he not made a particular decision. There is a scene where he's actually seeing (as if it were notes in organizer) all his colleagues dying (although in his universe they are around him and are alive). There is a war going on and in the section of the organizer that says Things To Do Today, the entry says "die". This was quite chilling to see. These terrible things happened because he made a small decision which had a profound effect. Because there was just that moment of uncertainty when the two organizers in the two universes could interchange and because of that minor decision, he and every one he knew died. In fact, he hadn't made that minor decision in this universe, so he was alive, but he could hear what would have happened. We don't often get that opportunity. Writing those scenes taught me a few things. One of the things it taught me is that you should never regret. You should never say, "If only I had taken that job. If only I had not done this or I had not done that." Because you don't know what else would have happened. If you had taken that job, yes it would have offered better promotions and more money, but if you had been going to work to that job on a particular day, you'd have been run over by a bus. You don't know what other things would have happened as a result of the decision. So, basically, you better just take what comes down the pipe.

A theme that also seems to run through the books is the effect of people's beliefs actually shaping reality. Is that true? Have our beliefs and stories and fantasies made certain things "come to life"? How?

If I was late for an appointment and came running out of a bank just at the same time as the alarms accidentally went off, I might well get shot by someone. Certainly if it happened in America I might find myself shot by a policeman who believed I was a bank robber. Beliefs do shape reality. We know this to be the case. Thousands of people every year die because of what they believe. Becoming dead after being alive is a fairly major change in reality, I would think.

I was also thinking along the lines of your book Small Gods and the idea that a God's powers were directly related to how many people actually believed in him.

Well, sooner or later a fantasy writer invents something because it's going to fly, and you want it to fly for the length of a book. I don't pretend that that is my take on how the universe really works. But it is a useful tool.

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I must admit that my favorite characters are the wizards of the Unseen University. I loved it when they tumbled into a new world in The Last Continent -- their way of dealing with any problem is unique, to say the least. What kind of feedback have you gotten from academics over your view of university life in Discworld?

Generally, I get pretty good feedback from academics, I have to say. I get quite a lot of feedback, in fact. Sometimes they argue with me and sometimes they don't. I get quite a lot of feedback from ministers of religion, as well. I get quoted in sermons and things like that. It must be very puzzling to the people in the church. I do get quite a lot of letters from senior people at universities saying that, except for the magical elements, it is pretty much how life is in the universities.

Going back to what you were saying about the horrible word "wacky". I must say I've never really thought of your work as wacky. What makes it so funny to me is that it's actually quite logical and accurate. Maybe you just say what people won't say.

Well, I had a letter recently from a very well-known mathematician who said that the way the wizards solve problems is exactly the way mathematicians solve problems. You'll find half a dozen mathematicians clustered around the blackboard, all arguing with one another, all fighting for the chalk. Some of them will be rubbing out part of the equation that another one of them has just written. And out of this kind of creative hubbub comes a solution. That is exactly how the wizards work, as well.

I'd like to talk a bit about the practical side of being a writer. You've said you are from the Carpentry School of Writing. And you think it's very important that writers work on their craft. Could you expand on that a bit?

Okay. I have to say that I change the metaphor about once a week. But it may help if I give you an idea of how I go about writing.
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I'm about 10,000 words into my next book. Do I know what it is about? Yes, I do know what it is about, it's just that I'm not telling myself. I can see bits of the story and I know the story is there. This is what I call draft zero. This is private. No one ever, ever gets to see draft zero. This is the draft that you write to tell yourself what the story is. Someone asked me recently how to guard against writing on auto-pilot. I responded that writing on auto-pilot is very, very important! I sit there and I bash the stuff out. I don't edit -- I let it flow. The important thing is that the next day I sit down and edit like crazy. But for the first month or so of writing a book I try to get the creative side of the mind to get it down there on the page. Later on I get the analytical side to come along and chop the work into decent lengths, edit it and knock it into the right kind of shape. Everyone finds their own way of doing things. I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it. There's a phrase I use called "The Valley Full of Clouds." Writing a novel is as if you are going off on a journey across a valley. The valley is full of mist, but you can see the top of a tree here and the top of another tree over there. And with any luck you can see the other side of the valley. But you cannot see down into the mist. Nevertheless, you head for the first tree. At this stage in the book, I know a little about how I want to start. I know some of the things that I want to do on the way. I think I know how I want it to end. This is enough. The thing now is to get as much down as possible. If necessary, I will write the ending fairly early on in the process. Now that ending may not turn out to be the real ending by the time that I have finished. But I will write down now what I think the conclusion of the book is going to be. It's all a technique, not to get over writer's block, but to get 15,000 or 20,000 words of text under my belt. When you've got that text down, then you can work on it. Then you start giving yourself ideas.

Well it seems to me that you must be an amazing observer. Do you think that's true that you must be a good observer to write really great parody or satire?

For many years I was a journalist, and so I was trained to observe in a journalistic way. What I always say to people is that when it comes to inventing characters, don't base a character on someone you know. But it may be a good idea to base the character on a type of character that you know, because lots of other people will know people like that. And if they know people like that, then half the work has been done for you. People say, "I know someone just like Granny Weatherwax!" The reader is simply inserting that person that they know into the story. A great deal of character work lies not in describing the characters, but in describing the shape that they leave in the world. How they react to other people. How they face things. When they keep silent. The manner in which they say things. Character does not consist of telling the reader what color a person's eyes are and how tall he is. You do not need pages and pages of physical description to get a character. You can get nearly all the physical description you need by one thing that character says that makes people think, "Aha! I know exactly what kind of person would say something like that!"

What do you love most about your job?

(laughing) Well, I get paid shitloads of cash...which is good. I really do love to write. The curious thing is that during the last month or six weeks of a book, when I am editing, rewriting, refining and polishing my work, I say to myself: "If you're a good boy and finish this before the deadline, you're going to be allowed to write another book!" Because during the first month or two when you're working on a book (when a lot of options are still open) you don't have to be too disciplined. You're writing a lot, going down a lot of blind allies, you're finding out how the plot is going to work etc. That is a fun period, and I look forward to it. What I like doing is the actual writing itself. Once you've bought yourself the biggest word processor you can and you're living in the house you're going to live in, and you've got a nice desk, you're kind of running out of things to buy.

There's always a new computer!

Well, yes, there's always a newer computer. This house has computers like other houses have mice. In a month or two, I'm going on a holiday in Australia. We go most years. I always take a portable computer with me. When I am on holiday, I write twice as much as I do as when I am at home in my office. I'm relaxed, I'm having fun, I'm sitting out there overlooking the sea, with a nice glass of something beside me. The telephone isn't ringing; I haven't got any letters to write. I get up at six in the morning when it's light, and do some work before breakfast. Later on, we go out and have some fun. You go to bed when it's dark. It's as simple as that -- there's no electricity. My wife and I like holidays where you go and relax. You just lie there in a chair with a big drink in your hand. The big decision is whether you should go for a walk, or just lie there some more.

Would that be a banana daiquiri in your hand?

Let me tell you about banana daiquiris. Years and years ago, there was a world science fiction convention "What seems to be happening more and more (and I don't know why this is so) is that a lot of people labor under the misapprehension that if they cannot write it's because some kind of outside influence is preventing them from doing so -- as if the universe itself is conspiring against their natural destiny of writerdom."
in New Orleans. It had been a really hard day. I'd driven all the way from Pensacola and was quite tired. The hotel had done the usual: "Sorry, sir, we have no record of your reservation at this time." When I showed them the fax confirming my reservation, they denied the existence of the fax. Finally, after being ever so unpleasantly English about it, I got a very, very nice room on the top floor. An American friend said, "I know. I shall take you out to the All-Night Frozen Daiquiri Shop on Bourbon Street!" By that time, I wouldn't have known if we were heading to the All-Night Bourbon Shop on Daiquiri Street. I didn't know that there was alcohol in a daiquiri. I thought it was a pleasant fruit drink. So I had the liter size. I thought, "It's been a long day, and I need a refreshing pick me up." I will say this for the Americans: In England, if you'd ordered a drink that was twice the normal size, they'd water it down. But in New Orleans, a liter daiquiri has twice as much alcohol as a half liter daiquiri. It was so delicious that I had another one. Then I thought I'd try a liter of the peach daiquiri, and I had about half of that one. In the 1950s comic books, sometimes a character would have a nuclear reactor fall on him. Then he'd become "Mr. Atomic". I drank so much banana daiquiri that night that I think every cell in my body was full of banana daiquiri. I became Dr. Daiquiri. I think that's the only way I survived. I couldn't feel my upper lip for quite awhile after that, though. The point is, if you make a real daiquiri, according to a real recipe, you don't feel well again until tea time the next day. If you make it with real cream and the two types of rum and all that, it is seriously bad for your head. The Bourbon Street daiquiris were a lot of fun. But when I'm in Australia I drink beer, because if you are in Australia and you don't drink beer you are prosecuted.

Let's talk a bit about the book you collaborated with Neil Gaiman on: Good Omens. That was before email, so how did it work on a practical basis? What was the most challenging aspect of writing with someone else?

I'm sure what I have to say will echo what Neil has said. When two people work on a book, it isn't a case where

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
each one does 50% of the work. Each one does 100% of the work. There are some bits in Good Omens which I know are mine. There are some bits in Good Omens which I know are Neil's. There are some bits which were Neil's idea which I wrote, and there are some bits which were my idea which Neil wrote. Some bits we no longer know exactly whose ideas they were, or who wrote them. By the time we'd gone through all the drafts, it had been written by some sort of composite entity. We wrote it in the 14th century. We each had one phone line and a 1200 baud modem. We'd work it out: "OK, you send, I'll receive." Sometimes it would take 20 minutes to half an hour before we could send the stuff. It would have been cheaper and easier to have rung each other up and sneezed out the text in Morse Code. I was the Keeper of the Disks. I insisted that there should only be one official version in existence at any time. The moment it split into two, we would be in dead trouble. But Neil would sometimes send me a disk with 2000 words, saying " This is the scene with so and so -- insert it here." It more or less worked. It took us about six weeks to do the first draft. I think it worked because, at the time, we were each making a name for ourselves in our respective fields. It's not that we didn't take it seriously. But we were relaxed. We thought we would earn some holiday money by doing it. The nice thing about collaborating is that there is one other person in the world who is thinking about the exact same thing that you are thinking about. We both have a similar reading background, I suppose. It was quite rare when one of us came up with something that the other guy didn't know about. So we could bounce ideas off one another quite easily.

Where did you meet Neil? How did you become friends?

The Discworld books were just beginning to come onto the market in a big way. Neil was doing some journalism at the time. He interviewed me. We got on well, and kept in touch. We're continents apart now. I think he's in the States permanently, I would imagine. Most people think Neil is American, anyway. Although he is firmly English, that's where he gravitates.

If you were forced to go live on Discworld for a year, where would you go?

Probably as deserted an island as I could possibly find. I would live in the back of a cave for an entire year. Although, I have to say as I get older, Unseen University sounds like the perfect habitat. No one expects you to actually do any work. You just show up for meals, which are quite good. You just find an office somewhere and move in. There used to be offices in Cambridge and Oxford which were a bit like that. In fact, some of the feedback from academia tells me that it was not so long ago that there were other universities where it was like that. If you turned up, and appeared to know what you were doing you could almost fit into the university. You wouldn't be paid anything, but you could find an office somewhere that wasn't being used and everything was so disorganized that no one knew whether you should be there or not. Things have changed now, you know. People actually expect results. Someone who knew what he was talking about and was an interesting speaker could get by with it. I was told a story that unused offices were nailed up, which meant they weren't subject to what you would call property taxes. So all you would have to do was go and pull the nails out of the door and move your stuff in. No one knew whether you were supposed to be there or not. But if you were there for long enough, especially long enough for some staff turnover to take place, you were there permanently. I just love that idea. You can't run a university as if it was a business, in any case. It cannot work like that. Some of the best ideas have come from people standing around in a common room shouting at the tops of their voices. You cannot regiment ideas.

Do they Americanize your books, either the adult or the children's books? For example, the Harry Potter books are Americanized.

They have Americanized my children's books. I think that there is an argument for preventing confusion.
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We're talking the "pavement vs. sidewalk" argument. If the use of the English word is not only unfamiliar, but changes the meaning of the sentence to the reader, then it makes some sense to change the word. Generally speaking, there may be two or three words or usages per book. Certainly, these days we discuss it. If I use a word which an appreciable number of Americans will not be familiar with, then we change it. We consider whether or not a particular phrase or word has overtones which make it particularly funny in English which would be completely lost in America. A classic case that we considered at one point was the Morris 1000. The Morris 1000 is a type of car. It's very old; the type of people who drive these cars tend to be little old ladies who drive very slowly. There probably is an American car which conjures up exactly the same idea or picture. But the Morris 1000 doesn't mean anything to most Americans. I think Neil Gaiman summed it up when he said, "We put up with your fire hydrants, congressional committees, and all the other American usages that we pick up. It's about time you got something back." I don't think you can be completely hard and fast about it. There are some cases where a change should be made, but the thought should be: "Don't change." It's much much worse with children's books. I did a series which has done incredibly well for the Science Fiction Book Club, the Johnny Maxwell series.

It's not as well known over here, unfortunately.

Well, no, because the books have never been published in America as main titles. One publisher said the books were too intelligent for American children! (This was pre-Harry Potter.) But, the books made it to number one on both the children's and the adult bestseller lists in the U.K. So somehow I don't think they can be too difficult for children to understand.

Well, it looks like you've got a US tour coming up soon. Do you like touring or do you dread it?

Yes, at the end of March. In the last ten years I've spent something ike over 17 months on the road.

Just like a rock musician.

Yes, except I don't get any sex. I don't get any drugs. I can listen to as much rock n' roll as I like, though. To say I like "When it comes to inventing characters, don't base a character on someone you know. But it may be a good idea to base the character on a type of character that you know, because lots of other people will know people like that. And if they know people like that, then half the work has been done for you."
it would be the wrong kind of word to use. The musician analogy is probably not such a bad one. I mean you can spend as much time as you like in the studio working on the album, but you know in your heart that it's not rock n' roll until you've taken it on the road. And you actually do just sometimes have to get out there. Every other year I do an Australian tour. I do tours of the UK, tours of Germany -- I do lots of tours. I think they're necessary, but I don't know why I think they're necessary. They're bad for the digestion. Especially in the States: you spend a lot of time flying from hub to hub. So half the time you're flying backwards with a bag of pretzels for your dinner. You get in late, you're always rushing around, and you never have time to check up with yourself. But a fortnight after you've done a tour you want to do another one, like the famous Chinese meal. The wonderful thing is that they have their good moments and their bad moments. I've gone into this upcoming tour with my eyes a little more wide open. Fortunately, HarperCollins has been very understanding about it. Flying internally in America is not a huge amount of fun, but they have tried to make it easier on me.

Are there any indispensable items that you always take with you on tour, or that you've learned to take with you?

Yes, there are several items. I now take a Palm Pilot, but I used to just take a note pad. The most important thing about the Palm Pilot is that it allows you to write directly on the screen. I take that and I take a small torch. The reason is that every night you wake up in a different hotel room and you can't find the light switch. I make certain I write down in big letters the number of my hotel room. Because you always check in late or you're always in a rush, you throw your bags on the bed and you rush off again. Naturally, when you return you can't remember what the hell your hotel room number is. You can't remember where your hotel is, half the time. The last item is a bottle of some indigestion medicine which is absolutely essential on any tour. Touring is a strange kind of life. It's only after it's over that you work out whether it was fun or not. On the last American tour, what I particularly enjoyed was when the guys from the Adventures in Crime and Space bookstore in Austin took me out for some Texas barbeque. They said to me, "Now we'll only give you a small plate, because we know that you Brits can't eat as much as we Texans." But after about twenty minutes, I was the one that wanted another plate. Yes, I really fell for the old Texas barbeque. I'll be in Austin for my tour in April for the book. I do hope I won't be doing too much radio, though. You always go on a radio program called, "Good Morning City Whose Name You Can't Remember." The announcer says, "Hey, you've done a book. That's great! ... and now, traffic news..."

When Neil Gaiman and I were doing the Good Omens tour it was great fun because I was suffering with one other person. We
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were actually interviewed by a very well-known interviewer in that particular city who hadn't even read his notes, let alone the book. You may recall that the subtitle of the book was "The Nice and Accurate Predictions of Agnes Nutter." He thought that this was the real title of the book -- that it was a nonfiction book about predictions. He had no idea it was even fiction. Neil and I could see the engineer in the booth doubled over with laughter, because he happened to be a fan. We looked at one another, and the unspoken thought was, "We'd better not wipe the floor with this guy." So we had to find a way of giving answers that would be technically correct, but somehow sending the message that the host was conducting the wrong interview. We did emerge fairly unscathed. Then, there was another one where we were at a public broadcasting radio station somewhere on the West Coast. The director of protocol came out to see us before the interview. She looked us up and down and said, "You're English, aren't you? Now, you're not going to swear on the air are you?" We replied, "Well, we hadn't intended to…" But, of course, now that was all we could think about! We were passing each other notes saying, "Be sure not to say $#@!" Many public broadcasting stations are hounded by people looking for any pretext to get them off the air, so I suppose that's why this station was so worried about swearing. We did find out that Americans don't think that the word "bugger" is swearing, because they don't know what it means. I mean, it's not like the London Times or the BBC are known for the amount of swearing they allow. But to be told not to swear, well, it just made it impossible not to think of it. The words would just bubble up. But we acted like gentlemen.

Can you give us a preview of the next Discworld novel, The Truth?

Certainly. Actually, it was very fun to write because it's almost the story of my life. It's about a man and
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woman who, almost by default, start the Discworld's first newspaper. I had lots of fun with the idea. For example, the photographer is a vampire, but he's in recovery. He's actually got the black ribbon; he's a member of the Überwald Temperance League. They meet every week for cocoa and a singsong, and try not to think about blood. The problem with being a vampire photographer is that every time you use the flash attachment you become a little pile of dust. So it's a drawback. There are also two Tarantino villains -- straight out of Pulp Fiction -- they really were fun to write. Sort of Discworld versions of those villains. It's about the little things that happen when you start writing newspapers. How do people deal with you? How did some guy, because he had access to a notebook and a printing press, have all this power? It's really very strange. Who are you answerable to when you are working on a newspaper? Who can give you orders? Where is your responsibility? What is the truth and do you know it when you see it? Some of the serious issues that get raised by newspapers, I approach in Discworld, I hope in an amusing way.

And the longstanding objections to moveable type?

As Lord Vetinari says, "History is a bit like earthquakes. The strain builds up and builds up, and then overnight a whole field of turnips has moved six feet along the fault line." From a practical standpoint, the moveable type is used by the Dwarves. Politically, it would not be a good idea to fall out with the Dwarves, just at the moment. There are a lot of little reasons why it is in everyone's best interest to allow this to happen. Lord Vetinari's main objection to moveable type is that it makes it much easier for a lot of people to actually know what's happening. But he realizes that if you own the newspapers, then you can prevent large numbers of people from knowing what's really happening.

Rumor has it that a major character will be killed off in the near future. Is that true?

That rumor came from an off-the-cuff comment I made in an interview which got repeated all around, with more and more speculation. I am happy to let that speculation continue.

I understand that you interact a great deal with your fans. How much fan mail and email do you get?

It's overwhelming. I don't count it any more. I don't get as neurotic about handling it as much as I used to. I used to really worry about it. Especially if someone's return address wasn't very well-written. I would try to track down the correct address. These days, if I open a letter which begins, "I bet you won't read this letter..." I now think, "Well, fair enough then. I'll put this one back on the heap." But I do my best to answer it.

Do you use the Internet a great deal? I notice you don't have an officially sanctioned website yet.

That is going to change very soon. My agent is setting one up. Have you heard the saying, "Rumor runs "Why is it that we always use these really machismo words, like 'surfing'? What surfing really means is sitting there, getting hemorrhoids, staring at a screen while clicking on a mouse. It's not surfing at all; it's just being a kind of couch potato."
around the world, before the Truth has its boots on"? The Internet is rumor running around the world. It's just amazing how far and how fast something that isn't true can spread. A year or two ago I said in an interview with a local paper, that after the 25th Discworld book that I was going to give Discworld a rest because there were some other projects I wanted to devote attention to. The journalist didn't print my statement accurately, and then someone didn't read it very accurately, and then somehow my comments turned into the headline: "Discworld is Over After Book 25!" I got so many emails about it! And all I was going to do was take a year off to write a different kind of book. So it would be nice to have one website where I can make sure that things like tour details, what I'm doing etc. are actually things that I have posted and are accurate. Up until now I haven't done it because I've got a lot of things to do and running a website would take up too much time. So I'm going to have some help in doing it.

I do use the Internet. It's like the telephone or the fax. It's very, very useful, but I don't go to bed with it. I can think of a lot better uses for my time than surfing the Internet. Why is it that we always use these really machismo words, like "surfing"? What surfing really means is sitting there, getting hemorrhoids, staring at a screen while clicking on a mouse. It's not surfing at all; it's just being a kind of couch potato. I do buy stuff off the Web, and I use it all the time. I download software and order things. It's amazing how much stuff I order from the United States. But it's just another thing to use. It is not my hobby. It's something that makes life much more complicated, in many respects.

I can't imagine that you have a great deal of free time, anyway.

It depends on how you define free time. I recently said to a relative of mine, "We're having a holiday this year." And she said, "From what, exactly?"

When you love your work, maybe you don't need as many holidays.

Yes, that's the point. Either you're working all the time, or you're not working at all. It's very hard to define it when you're writing. I spend a lot of time in my office every day.

You have a home office, right?

We seem to be accumulating offices these days. I have the office that is full of mess, then there's the office that's full of books and not too much paperwork, where I actually sit and write. I write directly on the computer.

Are there any misconceptions about you that you'd like to set straight? Or about writing, in general?

There is one thing that I get asked all the time -- on a daily basis actually -- by aspiring writers who contact me. They say, "I keep starting things; I don't know how to finish them. I don't seem to be able to find time to write. I don't seem to be able to get my ideas down on paper." What I always say is, "Consider, just consider for a moment, that although you want to be a writer, being a writer may not be where your particular genius lies." When I was a kid, I really, really wanted to be an astronomer. I have no real mathematical abilities whatsoever. I'm fine when it comes to the numbers, but when you show me a quadratic equation I'm completely lost. What I wanted to do was to stare in wonder at the universe, which is not exactly what an astronomer has to do. I think that what a lot of people who want to be writers really want is to have written. That is harder. What I tend to say is, "Look, if you wanted to be a boxer you would listen if someone like Mike Tyson said to you, 'Ok, you've gotta go down to the gym. You've gotta eat the right kind of stuff. You've gotta do your road work. You've gotta work at it for years and years, and it's going to be quite hard.' You'd say, 'Yes, Mike.'" So to writers I say, you're going to have to read a lot -- shitloads in fact. So many books that you're going to overflow. You've got to hook into the popular culture of the 20th century. You've got to keep your mind open to all sorts of influences. You've got to sit down for hours at a time in front of the computer. And you must make grammar, punctuation and spelling a part of your life.

People actually start arguing with me at this point. They think it should be easier than that. But it's not easier than that. After a while, it becomes less difficult because you've developed your own technique. But it is every bit as hard as quite a lot of other things. What seems to be happening more and more (and I don't know why this is so) is that a lot of people labor under the misapprehension that if they cannot write it's because some kind of outside influence is preventing them from doing so -- as if the universe itself is conspiring against their natural destiny of writerdom. People
write to me for advice. If I'm kind, I send them back maybe 400 words on how to write. And it's valuable resource. But people don't want to be told that they have to sit there for a long time and work hard at it. That is not the answer that they desire to hear. I'm sure you get that all the time, people saying, "I've written a book and I don't have the faintest idea of what to do to get it published." And the obvious answer (which they should know) is that if they go down to a library, there is a whole shelf full of books talking about manuscript preparation and how to submit a manuscript. I mean this is not difficult stuff to find out. If you can't go and find it out, maybe you're missing something.

Black Dagger · Dołączył: 14 Lut 2004 Skąd: Kraków

Tutaj jest koljny wywiad, tym razem w formie wywiadu radiowego.

QbaJak

wywiad zamieszczony w gazecie Metro (bezpłatnym dzienniku dostępnym w W-wie)

Nie zamierzam przestać
z Terrym Pratchettem rozmawia Maja Staniszewska

Mamy w Polsce rocznicę - mija dziesięć lat od chwili, gdy ukazał się u nas "Kolor magii" pierwsza książka o Świecie Dysku. Gratulacje! Jak się pan czuje w takich sytuacjach?"

Zmęczony!

Wiem, że już setki razy odpowiadał Pan na to pytanie, ale proszę spróbować jeszcze raz, specjalnie dla nas: skąd wziął się płaski Światt Dysku?

Tysiące razy! We wczesnych latach 80 był wielki boom na powieści fantasy. Nie wszystkie z nich były dobre. Pomyślałem, że czas się zabawić z niektórymi pojawiającymi się w nich kliszami. Obraz znany z mitologii - płaski świat spoczywający na grzbiecie gigantycznego zółwia - zaludniłem tradycyjnymi bohaterami powieści fantasy, które obdarzyłem cachami współczesnych ludzi.

Pańskie książki znajdują się na specjalnych półkach w polskich księgarniach. Miał Pan zamiar napisać tak dużą serię powieściową?

W Anglii mamy chyba wieksze półki. Mieści się na nich więcej niż 30 książek. Nie, nigdy nie planowałem wielkiej serii. Po prostu raz na jakiś czas piszę książkę.

Był Pan już w Polsce. Jak się Panu podoba nasz kraj i polscy fani?

Ile można zobaczyć podczas podróży promocyjnej? Lotniska, księgarnie, te same reklamy telefonii komórkowej... Ale ludzie traktowali mnie bardzo dobrze, a fani byli wspaniali. Czule też wspominam mieszkanie, w którym zatrzymałem się w drukarni pod Gdańskiem. Było cudownie chłodno, ciemno i cicho, a ja wyspałem się jak nigdy w życiu!

Moje ulubione postaci ze Świata Dysku to Sam Vimes, Marchewa i Śmierć. A jakie są Pańskie? Która z nich najbardziej przypomina Pana?

Vimes to z pewnościa najlepszy do opisywania bohater, bardzo złożony. Jednak kawałeczek mnie jest w każdej postaci.

Świad Dysku ewoluuje. Pierwsze powieści były po prostu zabawne,, a poziom zabawy był naprawdę wysoki. Z czasem Pana książki stawały się coraz bardziej poważniejsze - zaczęły w nich padać bardzo poważne pytania o współczeny świat. Zrobił Pan to celowo?

Tak. Świat Dysku piszę od 21lat. Powieści musiały się zmieniać, żeby przetrwać. Poza tym nie mógłbym napisać 30 książek takich, jak "Kolor Magii". Zwariowałbym.

Czy jest specjalny "światodyskowy" pokój pełen map, szkiców postaci i notatek, z modelem płaskiego świata na środku? Czy ma Pan to wszystko po prostui w głowie?

Są mapy i modele, ale w mojej głowie. Mogę pisać w dowlnym miejscu, w którym jest komputer. Ale mam też biuro.

Czy będzie więcej powieści Świata Dysku dla dzieci, takich jak "Zadziwiający Maurycy"?

Tak. Są już dwie następne - "The Wee Free Men" i "A Hat Full of Sky". Zamierzam dalej pisać książki dla dzieci, tak samo jak dla dorosłych.

Co jakiś czas wraca informacja, że Terry Gilliam przygotowuje się do ekranizacji Pańskiej książki "Dobry Omen". Ale ostatnio zapanowała cisza. Czy wie Pan, co się dzieje z tym projektem?

Któż to wie? Hollywood jest zagadką. Wiele filmów umiera, zanim sie narodzi.

Myśli Pan o sprzedaży praw do ekranizacji którejś powiści o Świecie Dysku? Współczesna technika filmowa pozwala na tworzenie takich światow na ekranie. Peter Jackson mógłby sobie z tym nieżle poradzić...

Przenigdy nie chciałbym zobaczyć Vimesburgera! Nie jestem nawet pewien, czy za Świata Dysku dałoby się zrobić dobry film. Najlepszy do ekranizacji byłby "Mort". Ale nie marzę o filmach, mam już wystarczającą ilość pieniędzy.

QbaJak

króciutki wywiad zaczerpnięty z prorok.pl

Wywiad został przeprowadzony przez Gryfka i Jane Honesty 3-ciego czerwca w poznańskiej Bibliotece Brytyjskiej.

Gryfek i Jane Honesty: Czy jest Pan Utopistą, przedstawiając niesamowity Świat Dysku?
Terry Pratchett: Nie. (śmiech)

G i JH: Kto, wśród pisarzy, jest Pana autorytetem?
Terry Pratchett: Autor, który najbardziej na mnie wpłynął to brytyjski pisarz G. K. Chesterton. Nie pisał science - fiction, ale napisał dwie najlepsze książki fantasy, jakie powstały.

G i JH: Czy ma Pan własną wersję "Piosenki o Jeżu"?
Terry Pratchett: W sieci osiągalna jest dość interesująca wersja, osobiście nigdy nie próbowałem wypełnić tych miejsc, które są wygwiazdkowane.

G i JH: W jaki sposób w Pana umyśle zjawił się Śmierć?
Terry Pratchett: W "Kolorze Magii" zjawił się dla dowcipu. Był oparty na historii z "Tysiąca i jednej nocy", "Spotkanie w Somalii", że cały czas ucieka facet przed śmiercią, ale te miejsca do których ucieka, to są właśnie te, w których śmierć na niego czeka.

G i JH: W jaki sposób wyobraża sobie Pan najdalszą przyszłość dla ludzi?
Terry Pratchett: Nicość- Przestaniemy istnieć. (śmiech)

G i JH: Czy na Dysku nastąpi kiedyś koniec świata?
Terry Pratchett: Nie, nigdy. Ale pewnego dnia sam umrę.

G i JH: Dlaczego czarownicą musi być kobieta, a magiem - mężczyzna?
Terry Pratchett: Bo ja tak powiedziałem! (śmiech)

G i JH: Co chciałby Pan przekazać swoim piszącym fanom w Polsce?
Terry Pratchett: Po pierwsze - musisz się nauczyć czytać jak najwięcej. Musicie wprowadzić do swojego życia gramatykę, ortografię i interpunkcję. Musicie dokładnie studiować to, co czytaliście, żeby wiedzieć, jak autorzy osiągnęli efekt. A jeżeli ja to potrafię - każdy sobie poradzi.

G i JH: Dziękujemy za wywiad.

Serdecznie dziękujemy Sławomirowi Brudnemu z wydawnictwa "Prószyński i S-ka", który umożliwił nam spotkanie się z pisarzem. Szczególne podziękowania należą się wieloletniemu tłumaczowi książek Pratchetta- panu Piotrowi Cholewie. To dla nas zaszczyt, że sam Piotr Cholewa pomógł nam przy wywiadzie- przez to wywiad jest bardziej pratchettowski.

QbaJak

nie do konca wiwiad - nazwalbym to raczej monologiem

gdzie w role "narratora" przejmuje Steven H. Silver

wywiadzik zaczeroniety z www.sfsite.com

For those who don't know, and past sales indicate that many Americans do not, Terry Pratchett is the author of a series of extremely funny books about a place called the Discworld, which is very much like our own world, except that it is flat, carried on the backs of four elephants, who in turn are carried on the back of a giant turtle, and magic works.

Although Pratchett is considered the best-selling living author in Britain and is extremely popular in Australia, his American readers seem to be something of a cult following. With the release of The Fifth Elephant, Pratchett is undertaking a lengthy tour of the US in an attempt to introduce more people to his humorous, but very cogent, view of life.

When I had the opportunity to speak to Pratchett in Chicago, he had literally just arrived from a science fiction convention in Austin, Texas.

Bad weather delayed his flight so I had arrived at his hotel slightly before he did. Once he had checked in, we sat in the bar and talked over a couple of Goose Island beers. Despite a long day of travel and bad weather, Pratchett was amiable and had even taken the time to call the hotel from the airport to make sure I knew about his delay (the hotel, however, failed to pass along the message).

While Chicago is a world class city with many attractions, Pratchett noted that there was not a lot of "free time" on a book tour, but he had seen "Lower Wacker Expressway," noting that "the Blues Brothers drive down it in, well, The Blues Brothers." The rest of his time would be spent in interviews, book signings and an online chat. Mostly, of course, he was in Chicago to promote the 24th Discworld novel.

As Pratchett has written more novels, his writing style and view of the books has changed.

"The first couple were just gag books and I wasn't really certain too much of what I was doing. I was doing it for the fun to seriously parody a lot of bad fantasy, and, indeed some good fantasy, which nevertheless is worth parodying. Since that time, I've discovered the joy of plot and the books have tended, over the years, to become a little deeper and sometimes, especially in the last few years a little darker."

Even writing "darker" books, the Discworld novels are humorous novels.

Pratchett includes many jokes which are based on specific cultural references which may not be familiar to all his readers. "It really worries people. Not everything in the books is a pun or a joke. In fact, there are very few puns. It looks as if there might be more." Much of the humour is derived by lampooning common cultural references.

Because Pratchett is writing in Britain for a largely British crowd, this means, of course that much of the humour is dependent on a knowledge of British culture; however, as Pratchett is quick to point out, much of British (and indeed world) culture is based on America.

"I had to keep explaining to people at the convention in Texas that we know about a lot of things in America. The average Brit knows infinitely more about the minutiae of American culture than the average American knows about British culture -- simply because Western culture is now largely American culture, so you just learn about it, pick it up from the movies and the television."

Nevertheless, sometimes Pratchett's material is specific to a region. A case in point is the novel The Last Continent, which is set on the continent of XXXX, the Discworld equivalent to Australia. The Last Continent is filled with enough Australian cultural references that it caused a reader to ask on the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup if the Americans and British readers missed many of the jokes.

"The references you missed you didn't notice. Or, you thought that was just funny. For instance, there is a whole series where Rincewind is riding around on a little horse that is so sure-footed that it can run up slightly on the roofs of caves. There's a whole sequence there that is based on the Australian poem 'The Man From Snowy River.' I don't know if there is an American poem that has quite the same place in the nation's heart. That's one that all Australians will know and if you don't then it's all just Rincewind running around, having fun. And there are other things, like the XXXX ministers are put into prison as soon as they are elected and Rincewind asks why and they say it saves time.

"Australian politicians are notorious for getting put in prison. But the point is it probably is still funny even if you don't know some of the background."

As the series progressed, Pratchett moved away from parodying fantasy novels and began to satirize daily existence in the real world.

"I suppose if the truth were known, I found how sterile the opportunities of the classic fantasy universe were. Because the classic fantasy universe doesn't change very much. A lot of humour has to do with familiarity and there is little about the classic fantasy universe that is real to us. Take Lord of the Rings. Big battle. 'Hurray, we have a king again. Let's all go home.' What happens next day? What happens is all these armies are scattered around the place. There's thousands, millions of defeated warriors a long way from home. The elves will have got their green cards and buggered off to the west. The landscape has taken a severe beating. Who's going to take out the trash? What happens tomorrow? And you never hear that sort of thing. And afterwards, then the politicking starts. We know that history doesn't stop when a war is completed. It was kind of these things which led me to turn my attention to what we might call non-traditional fantasy targets, but in the classic fantasy universe."

Pratchett draws parallels between what he has done with the Discworld and the traditional English pantomime, a traditional form of entertainment dating back more than a century.

"Don't run away with the idea that I knew what I was doing. This is post facto reasoning.

"You have no tradition of pantomime here. And sometimes I wish we had no tradition of pantomime in England, but, pantomime kept going year-in, year-out. And the classic story-line of the pantomime tends to stay the same. Everything else becomes modern. The references are modern.

"Often television stars and other well-known people will be part of the cast and the pantomime and aspects of the script will be built around them. So the pantomime keeps going because it has these modern references all the time. I suppose Discworld can be the same sort of thing."

In any event, the Discworld has changed over time as Pratchett honed his skills as a writer. In early books, Pratchett referred to several characters only by their title. The Archchancellor of Unseen University or the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. As time progressed, the characters acquired names and more definable personalities.

"In those days, the Archchancellor would change at least once per book. I'm a little uncertain about [whether the Patrician changed or has always been Lord Vetinari]. Sourcery actually marked the boundary line. The books before that were 'Old Discworld'; the books after that were 'New Discworld." They are the same place, but written by a better writer.

"Because the early ones were written in the fantasy tradition. You populate, apart from your heroes, with rogues, beggars, vagabonds, lords, whores... you don't think of them as characters. But I find it much more fun to bring them forward as characters."

Discworld has spawned a large number of auxiliary products, not least of which are a series of four wall maps depicting the Disc was a whole and three regions associated with the Disc. At one time, Pratchett declared that the Disc and Ankh-Morpork (two of the mapped regions) were unmappable.

"The reason I said it was unmappable was in those [other, traditional] fantasy books, the map was clearly drawn before the event. What we did was, after twelve, thirteen, fifteen books, then we mapped it. But the point is we mapped what was in the books. In other words, the landscape was created, then the landscape was mapped. We didn't map and then, as it were, create the landscape based on the map. And indeed, the very act of mapping gave me fresh ideas and locations and the nature of the city of Ankh-Morpork. Even the Lancre map, the third map, Paul [Kidby] would be drawing a few things in the corners as it were that interested him, and I thought, 'That's good. I know how that bit's going to fit in the story.'"

With four maps published, it is reasonable to expect more to come.

While Pratchett indicates that there will be more, he does not want his fans to start bothering the local bookseller just yet. "It's going to take me a few years to define some more undiscovered countries." The Discworld has been featured in two animated series which aired on British television based on the novels Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music.

Several computer games have also been based on the Discworld. With all those hands working on the world he created, Pratchett does not seem to have qualms about having other people play with his world.

"The animations and the games people have drawn things their way, but they've generally stuck to the map. But that's because they've got limitations of the medium. That's how you have to cartoon it. I'm still in charge of the novels. I can't be in charge of the animation because I'm not an animator, and that's a very vital thing. The spin-off thing is not really big. It only seems big because it is unusual for something which is largely a book-based thing to have this amount of spin-off. By comparison to media spin-offs, its minor."

The movies and plays which are based on Discworld serve to increase his readership where they are available, but in the US, Pratchett needs to increase his readership among people who have never heard of him and do not consider themselves science fiction fans. However, the book industry has changed with a small mid-list and stores tending to pull books from the shelves faster, before they have a chance to find their target audience.

"Then and now, it is only possible to start off and begin to build up a readership and build up a readership and build up a readership and then you get noticed. It is much harder to do that in the book industry in the US. Because unless you are an instant bestseller, the books are not going to stay on the shelves long enough to build up a readership except in a small number of specialty shops.

"I think now, with the recent Avon-Harper merger, there is a sense that people have gotten behind it and the books from now on will be published simultaneously in the US and the UK, until something goes wrong."

Although the UK has turned out several authors who write quality humour, Pratchett was quick to point out that the British don't corner the market on humour.

"You have guys like Donald Westlake, who I believe is an American national treasure. You should re-carve Mt. Rushmore with his head. And yet he seems to be neglected. He sells okay, people have heard of him, but he's not like a bestseller, as such. And I think he's very very funny. So is Carl Hiassen in a dark sort of way.

"I like thrillers. I like modern, dark, humorous is the wrong word, wry might be a better word. Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, Joseph Wambaugh, Carl Hiassen. There is an occasional lightness of touch that may well resemble humour. I read all kinds of stuff. I'm quite omnivorous when it comes to reading."

One of the first characters Pratchett created for the series is the Wizard apprentice Rincewind, who has been appearing in Discworld novels since The Colour of Magic first appeared in 1983. Pratchett is on-record as not being overly fond of Rincewind because there is little character development involved with him.

"He's not my favourite character because it's hard to give him any depth. Rincewind is just the eternal 'reasonable' character. Therefore, he's a coward. He doesn't see the point in being kicked about. And he's surrounded by idiots and fools who often do want to get killed. And it occurs to one that he's probably decent under all. But, from my point of view, someone like Vimes or Granny Weatherwax is a far more interesting character. We can see far more going on inside their heads. They're more screwed up."

Most of the books set on the Discworld are set in one of four subseries (the City Watch, the Witches, Death and Rincewind). However, there are a couple of books (notably Small Gods and Moving Pictures) which stand on their own. Pratchett indicates that he will begin writing more books which do not rely as heavily on his known characters.

"As a new departure, starting with the next book, which is The Truth, my main characters are all new characters, but some of the characters who, in the past, have been main characters, are now small characters. If you are doing a journalism novel, a newspaper novel, the police are always going to be involved because that's how a newspaper works. So Vimes and company are in there; we know them because we've seen them before, but the main characters don't and the view my hero, my main protagonist, has of Vimes is different from the one we have because we've seen inside his head. That's refreshing. Seen from the point of view of someone who is something of a libertarian, Vimes does not always act in the best of ways, because he sees things like a policeman does. There may be a couple of books there where all the major roles are filled by people you've never met before. If in that book they go to Ankh-Morpork, we know that's the Patrician over there. We know that's Dibbler selling sausages. We know the wizards in the University, all of whom they may or may not meet. If it is necessary to meet someone in that position, that's who they will meet, if you follow me. I want to bring fresh characters into the series."

For those who don't know, and past sales indicate that many Americans do not, Terry Pratchett is the author of a series of extremely funny books about a place called the Discworld, which is very much like our own world, except that it is flat, carried on the backs of four elephants, who in turn are carried on the back of a giant turtle, and magic works.

When I had the opportunity to speak to Pratchett in Chicago, he had literally just arrived from a science fiction convention in Austin, Texas.

When working on new novels in the series, Pratchett finds that he does not necessarily need to refer to the older books to find characters and places which are appropriate.

"I have a pretty good reckoning system in my head. I find going back and reading The Discworld Companion is actually more useful. In both editions of the Companion, I've written a lot of new stuff. Some of it almost amounts to notes for future books, so I go through that to jog my memory. Stephen [Briggs] wrote no new material [for the Companion]. What he did was act like a super indexer and put together for me everything I had said about individual people, drawing, at times, on as many as six books. Everything that was new was written by me. That's generally the case on most of our projects.

"Stephen, as it were, builds the scaffolding and I build the house. He winces about it sometimes because he'll do something which I'll entirely re-write, but the point is that unless he had done it to start with, I wouldn't have known what to do. And it works as a system."

Stephen Briggs became involved with Discworld by turning the novel Wyrd Sisters into a play. He has since co-written books with Pratchett, worked on the Discworld maps, and turned more of the novels into plays.

"I'm not really involved in the plays. The ones that [Stephen] does, I've gone to see all of his. And a number of others. But I don't get involved in the writing of those because Stephen knows more about producing and directing a play than I do. When it comes to the actual writing of the novels and stuff like that, I can always pull rank because I know how to do those things because I've done them for so long. But, I've never acted or put a play together, so I have to bow to him."

Another theatrical project possibly on the drawing boards is the metamorphosis of the novel Good Omens, which Pratchett wrote with Neil Gaiman, into a film. There has been talk of this project for several years.

"We know Terry Gilliam likes it, because we met him in the early 90s and discussed it with him, and he was very keen on it. We know that he's been signed up by the [Peter and Marc] Samuelsons as director. But the fact that Gilliam has signed up for the film does not, in and of itself, mean that the film is ever going to get made.

"Both Neil and I are very, very pleased because we think a bad Gilliam film of Good Omens would be better than somebody else's good film. Mort is on-and-off as a live project. Curiously enough, we have no English movie interest whatsoever. All the interest is coming from Germany and the USA. I think that's because the English film industry is made up of a bunch of wankers. When the Brits are allowed to make movies by themselves, it either has to be very gritty stuff about jobless steelworkers or airy fairy stuff with Hugh Grant in it. The idea of doing a fantasy would not occur to them, whereas the Germans quite like that sort of thing. I leave out Paul Bamborough Production, who has got the rights and has stood by them through thick and thin and definitely wants to see Mort made as Mort to a script that's recognizable as Mort. He's thought this all along. The British movie industry as a whole seems quite puzzled about this sort of thing. 'What, you mean there's no part for Scottish drugtakers in it?' 'Couldn't Mort be a steelworker and take all his clothes off?' 'There's no part for Hugh Grant? Well, good Heavens, can you make movies like that?'"

Although the majority of Pratchett's novels are marketed to an adult audience, they can be enjoyed by younger readers as well. When I commented that I would feel comfortable handing one of Pratchett's novels to my ten-year-old nephew...

"Have you actually paid attention to what Nanny Ogg is saying, sometimes? It's an old English tradition. You use a kind of code and, if you can crack the code, then you know about it anyway. And in one of the books, Nanny says something like, 'The recipe for a happy life is stand before your god, bow before your king and kneel before your husband.' But the boy understands everything she says there, then he already knows. So it doesn't really matter."

Pratchett has also written a half-dozen novels marketed to children, all of which can be read and enjoyed by adults. Pratchett does not see anything strange about this, believing that good children's fiction is a subset of good fiction which can be enjoyed by anyone.

"I would say that good children's fiction has always been read by adults. I'm slightly puzzled by the success of J.K. Rowling, only because I think people like Diana Wynne Jones's [novels] so much better. It's like the roulette wheel: it spins and a number comes up and you're in the right place at the right time. I have two more [children's books] planned. They are set in Discworld. Both of them are set in a fantasy universe, that is to say that the familiar rules of fantasy operate. Which may as well, therefore, be Discworld, although the major happenings of Discworld are happening somewhere else. One of them is taking place in a small town that's never been mentioned, but the feel is the same as Discworld, and the other will have a cast of thousands of characters, all of whom will be the Nac mac Feegle, who already appeared in Carpe Jugulum, who I really love... It could be in any fantasy universe, but it will be fun to do it as Discworld, but market it as a children's book. I will say that, even now, when I have the OBE for services to literature, mostly because I've always claimed never to write it, some newspapers persist in calling me a children's writer because they're still stuck in the groove of 'fantasy,' because children read fantasy. So if I write some deliberately children's Discworld books, it is going to muddy the waters even more."

A few years ago, Pratchett was made a member of the Order of the British Empire. Since knighthood and honours are foreign to most American's way of thinking, Pratchett has found himself downplaying the title several times on his North American tour. "I have to explain this to Americans. At best, its kind of a knighthood light. I was astonished. That kind of thing does not happen to genre authors." In fact, Pratchett feels that some of his best writing can be found in the children's Johnny Maxwell trilogy, the middle volume of which he claims is his strongest novel.

"Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead and Johnny and the Bomb were published in America by the good old Science Fiction Book Club because American children's publishers said they were too intelligent for American kids. But SFBC is doing so well with all my stuff they thought they would publish them directly. To write any more of them, they would have to present themselves. If you force me, I could sit down and come up with the idea for another Johnny Maxwell book, but generally I wait until an idea forms. I did Only You Can Save Mankind and I didn't think I would write any more about the kid. Then I did Johnny and the Dead in remembrance of my grandfather, who fought all the way through the First World War. That was also a children's video series in the UK. It was all done of a shoestring, so they were very happy with my help. And it actually did very well because they had some very good actors who gave up time to do it. Brian Blessed played William Stickers. There's a point where death hauls up a boat in the canal to take him away and William Stickers says, 'How much do you get paid for that? It's not enough.' The actors were so wrapped up, they cooked up an extra twist to the scene which will bring tears to your eyes. It may have been Brian Blessed doing it. As the boat is being punted away, he stands up and sings the last verse of "The Internationale." Then it fades to black. It happened because one of the actors said to Brian, 'My father was exactly like this character and that's how he would have liked to go out.' They put a lot into it and it was a fun thing."

"The strongest novel is undoubtedly Johnny and the Dead. Tom Bowler was being cremated and William is sitting outside the crematorium and he sees the ghost of young Tom Bowler come out and up the path come the remainder of the battalion which all died in France. After they did that, they got members of the old guards in their uniforms and, as they did it, they faded to sepia, so it would look exactly like the old pictures. And he just falls in and it was done beautiful. Of all the things I've done, I'm proudest of Johnny and the Dead. The whole philosophy of Terry Pratchett is in Johnny and the Dead."

Pratchett does not feel limited by the Discworld because it affords opportunities to write about the entire world.

"In the last few books and the next few books, you'll notice changes. In The Fifth Elephant, a semaphore system has been set up, which is clearly having the same galvanizing effect that the telegraph or the internet have had. That's kind of changing things as well because it became a plot twist in The Fifth Elephant. I'm allowing a bit of technological innovation while still keeping it firmly a fantasy universe. The new technology isn't magic. People have taken to semaphore because they can make money using it, but only Lord Vetinari has realized exactly what it really means."

Pratchett is pushing the boundaries of Discworld. In addition to writing novels which make less frequent use of common characters, he is revisiting and expanding an idea he did with an earlier book. In the first edition of Eric, the Discworld's version of the legend of Faust, the book included several illustrations. Pratchett, and one of his frequent collaborators are working on a new project which, while it makes extensive use of illustrations, is not a graphic novel.

"Along with Paul Kidby, who isn't Josh Kirby -- it so happens that both guys have five-letter names beginning with 'k' and ending in 'by' -- I'm doing a lavishly illustrated Discworld book, to the extent that the illustrations will be part of the story. Eric was a novelette with twelve illustrations. This will be a slightly longer text but illustrated on every page. Sometimes with double-page spreads. I chose the plot to give them as many opportunities for illustrations as possible. And the guy's an absolute genius. There were things I wanted to do and Cohen the Barbarian has a major role. Having done everything it's possible to do, he's found it was not enough and he's actually challenging the very gods themselves on their own turf. The book will be called The Last Hero."

One of the things which upsets Pratchett is the conclusion that just because the people he writes about are not flesh and blood, killing them for the sake of the story is something to be done one a whim. He tries to kill characters only when necessary and tries to make their deaths and murders as poignant as possible.

"In Men-at-Arms, I didn't know Cuddy was going to be the one who died. When it happened, I realized a character you liked had to die. Its not like The A-Team with machine guns and no-one gets killed. I had to say guns kill, that's what happens. That's the thing about guns; that's what they're there for."

At the same time, death is a reality in both Discworld and the real world (although in Discworld, Death makes frequent appearances, at least once in each novel). Pratchett, therefore is open about the fact that characters do die.

"A major character, that is, one who has had a major part in one or more books, is going to die within the next year or two and you don't have to be a genius to work out who it is likely to be, especially if you remember that dying on the Discworld is not necessarily the end of your involvement. Indeed, as we've seen in Johnny and the Dead, dying may be at the heart of the first day of the rest of your life. In Feet of Clay, Vimes's interest is in the attempted poisoning of the Patrician.

"[This] suddenly redoubles when he realizes that quite innocent people, a baby and an old lady, have also been killed. He realizes that if the Patrician is killed, it is, on paper, a bad thing, but it's too easy in fantasy to kill off hundreds of people. In reality, these people are just as real as the main characters. You have to think about what it actually means to kill one person before you blithely have some battle with thousands dead. There's a character later on in Feet of Clay, one of the bad guys, upon hearing that the old lady and the baby were accidentally killed asked, 'Were they important?' And Carrot says 'Of course they were.'"

Pratchett's fans are legion and they are very vocal about their favourite novels and characters. This causes slight problems since everyone tells Pratchett which characters to focus on, but the suggestions are usually contradictory. Pratchett has taken to ignoring the advice.

"The problem is that I get requests from people who want more of the witches or don't like the witches and want more guards. You'll get what you're given, but everyone is cheering for the party of choice.

"I get a lot of e-mail on the subject [of combining series]. But the fact is that if you like pickles and you like chocolate, but chocolate pickles may not be a good idea. If you put them all together, its sort of like a super-hero league where Batman can only have adventures because Superman happens to be out of town. What a lot of people want is to see a face-off between Granny and the Patrician. It may happen, but I don't want to do it just to have the fun of doing it. I almost had Vimes and Lady Sybil meeting Verence and Magrat in The Fifth Elephant, but it got edited out because I was doing it as 'series glue' rather than because it was necessary for the book."

Although Pratchett writes his novels relatively quickly, he does take the time to put a lot of thought into what he includes, not just to make sure that the books are funny, but to make sure they have something to say about the society in which we live.

"I know what I put in; what you get out is between you and your God. You might get out more than I put in."

Black Dagger · Dołączył: 14 Lut 2004 Skąd: Kraków

Następny wywiad, który znalazłem szperaj±c po sieci:

SFC: 'The Last Hero' relies on Paul Kidby's illustrations as much as the written word. How much input did you have on each other's work?

Terry Pratchett: I had a lot on his, but he had somewhat less on mine. I wrote 'The Last Hero' knowing that it was going to be illustrated, which was one reason why it was shorter than a full-length novel.

I had an upper limit, I think, of forty to forty-five thousand words. But when you know that the people and scenery are going to be illustrated, you don't actually have to describe it in too much detail. It's there! I got to see an awful lot of drawings at the pencil stage.

Equally, when I see how Paul's drawn the characters, that influences the way I think about them. But it's true to say that the influence is rather more me to him.

SFC: Does it affect the way you write your story? Or the style?

Pratchett: In this particular case, yes. Although this is only the second time that I have done an illustrated work. The other instance was with Josh Kirby when we worked on the original 'Eric', which wasn't as lavishly illustrated as 'The Last Hero', but it was still written for the accompanying drawings. And it to the extent you write it knowing it is going to be illustrated, you pick a plot line and characters which will lend itself to illustration.

I was also looking forward to the astronomical illustrations. I have on my wall the original of one of my favourite drawings; it's the one where the characters are on the moon and they're looking towards the 'Discworld' and the huge elephant's eye.

That's what I've always wanted: an illustration of 'Discworld' seen from space. One that treats it as a genuine astronomical object. I would love to see more drawings like that.

SFC: Do you have any plans to collaborate with Paul Kidby?

Pratchett: We have some loose plans. Both of us have got other things to do and, to be frank, it cannot be a collaboration for one very simple reason. It takes Paul the better part of eighteen months or more to do the illustrations. And it takes me about three months or less to do the writing. So while I can go back and tinker and change and add, it's not the type of collaboration you would have with two writers who would literally be sitting side by side.

SFC: Speaking of collaboration with writers, do you have any plans to do that in the future? Or was once enough?

Pratchett: No. It was enjoyable working with Neil Gaiman on 'Good Omens', but no more collaborations are planned.

SFC: Is 'Good Omens' still in the pipeline to be made into a film by Terry Gilliam?

Pratchett: If they can get the cash from the States. I believe they are still looking for fifteen million dollars - I hear various sums. Terry Gilliam went off to make his 'Don Quixote' movie while they were still trying to raise money and you know what happened to that.

SFC: Yeah. It went a bit belly up?

Pratchett: It certainly hasn't enhanced the chances of 'Good Omens' being made. I'm keeping out of it. The people in Hollywood aren't very sophisticated thinkers by and large; they cling to a rock and filter their food out of the water. I'm not holding my breath for Good Omens the movie.

SFC: The animated 'Discworld' series was very successful. Are there any plans to make the 'Discworld' stories into feature films?

Pratchett: I get lots of approaches, which I tend to be fairly crisp about for various reasons. One is that too many of then are from people who do not have the means or the money to go ahead with the project, but who still want to own the rights in case a bigger fish comes along. I'm not going to be caught out on that.

On the whole, movie people want to own everything. I don't know how much of 'Harry Potter' Warner Brothers now owns, but from what the fans say, it's actually rather a lot. 'Discworld' is about thirty books, plus all kinds of ancillary material, and that's not something I am going to hand over to a movie company in exchange for quite a lot of money. I've already made quite a lot of money, that's the real problem.

People come along with a movie deal and say, 'Heh! We can make you rich.' And I say, 'But I'm already rich. You can make me happy if you want?'

It may happen - we might find a way at some point. But I'm not hugely enthusiastic about a 'Discworld' film. I'm not even certain it's possible to do one; I think there are only three or four books that could be made into a good 'Discworld' movie.

SFC: I know 'Mort' was rumoured to be on the cards to be made into a film at one point.

Pratchett: 'Mort' was hanging about because a guy I know as a friend has got the rights, and he has got some integrity too. But after ten years, its been on the point of being made three or four times, then sunk away. It might happen, but then anything might happen. Although it would be true to say I'm not doing anything to help.

The thing you have to remember is that 'Lord Of The Rings' was massive in the 1960s and it wasn't until the next century that it got made into a decent movie. 'Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy' was massive in the 1970s and hasn't been made into a movie yet! These things take time.

SFC: So if a movie was hypothetically in production, would you like quite a lot of say in how it was produced?

Pratchett: No, I would like quite a lot of money! I don't think there is a director out there who is going to take much notice of what the author actually thinks about anything. The best thing you can do in those circumstances is say, 'Give me all the money in the world and then its yours', and I'm not inclined to say that. I don't think you can run the world on that basis.

I know the fan groups have lots and lots of discussions about whom would play whom, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, it's who is available and who is cheap.

SFC: There are a host of spin-offs from the 'Discworld' books, such as computer games, diaries, Clairecraft figures and so forth. How much input do you have on these?

Pratchett: If it's written, I have a huge amount of input, to the extent that I will have written or edited most of the words.

I see the Clairecraft figures photographed in wax. We have a little rule of thumb which is, if I can't prove it wrong, then it's right. It doesn't have to be my idea of what someone looks like, as long as the details mentioned in the books are right.

We have had one or two problems where the sculptor has got the wrong idea, but I have never had to go to the mat over them.

I was involved in the computer games quite intensively, but they are all history now. The other stuff, such as it is, is fairly low-key and I deal with it at a semi-fan level.

SFC: Speaking of fans, you have a close contact with your fan-base via the internet, book signings and conventions. Do you think authors should be involved with their readership?

Pratchett: I think it's entirely up to the author. I don't think it is laid down anywhere that writers should, and, speaking from where I sit, I can see advantages in not being too closely involved. You get asked for a lot of favours, but my office rule has to be that I don't do them.

Someone says: 'Would it be all right if you could send me an autographed photo'. If we do, then a month later: 'Can I be really cheeky and ask for an autographed photo for my mum, my uncle, my mate, this man I met in the pub and my hairdresser's nephew.'

The point is, I was a science fiction fan as a kid. I used to go to conventions, I did the whole Doctor Who fannish bit. So I understand the fans and rather like the scene in a strange kind of way. It has always seemed to me that the signing tours and the rest of it are part of the whole deal you sign up for.

SFC: Going off-subject, what did you think of the'Lord of the Rings' film?

Pratchett: I thought it was an absolutely magnificent film. I think it's is one of only two films I have ever seen which were almost better than the book that they were based on.

SFC: What was the other movie?

Pratchett: The other one was the 1960s production of 'Far From The Madding Crowd', which had Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Terrence Stamp in the three major roles. It was incredibly good.

Both the books concerned were quite dense. In each case what the movies did was invoke the spirit and scenery of the novel very well. In both books, the landscape was very important. I won't say they replace the novel, but they certainly enhance it.

SFC: What's the main sources of inspiration for your writing?

Pratchett: I don't know. Things happen. I have read for pleasure, including a lot of history, for many years. Ultimately, the novels just write themselves in my head.

SFC: What books are you reading at the moment?

Pratchett: I am re-reading 'Etiquette For Outlaws' by Rob Cohen and David Wollock. It is what it says, it is a book about - let's open it at random - how to buy porn from sex shops, the etiquette of tattooing, or how to be a pimp!

It's all good stuff. Very funny: what you might call the low life's guide to etiquette. I picked it up on a signing tour but didn't get around to looking at it until recently.

There's also a rather nice book called 'Strange And Secret Peoples' by Carole G. Silver. You may or may not know, but in Victorian times there was an awful lot of paintings and interest in fairies. This details the Victorian obsession with fairies and the occult.

I also have the 'Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher'. God knows who published it. It was first published in 1898 and it's just a book about rat-catching written by an old rat-catcher.

I read weird stuff. The little byways of history, shall we say.

SFC: Do you read any other comic fantasy?

Pratchett: No! Since I started, there have been four 'Next' Terry Pratchetts, which isn't the fault of the authors who were publicised as the new 'me'. So I keep away from the genre. The only guy I would own up to is Robert Rankin, and I make no secret of the fact that I thought his Brentford trilogy was the best stuff he ever did.

SFC: Your latest book, 'Nightwatch', features Commander Vimes quite heavily and there are many characters you return to in your books. Do you have any particular favourites - do the more familiar characters seem like old friends to you?

Pratchett: Well, they're fictional. I'm not. It's always worth bearing that in mind. I would say that the most interesting characters, from the point of view of a writer, are the ones who are screwed up in their head. That means people like Granny Weatherwax and Commander Vimes.

Vimes gets put through the wringer quite a lot in 'Nightwatch' and that makes him a far more interesting character to get inside the mind of than, say, someone like Rincewind. It gives him an extra dimension. It makes him more human and it makes him more like us.

People like Susan, Vimes, Granny Weatherwax and Death too, are the ones that hold the most amount of fun for me.

SFC: It has been said Nightwatch is slightly darker and covers more adult themes?

Pratchett: What do you mean, that they weren't adult beforehand? There's a revolution. People get killed. That's stuff for kids. There's been a lot of discussion about this; Nightwatch has been number one in the UK for the past nine weeks, and, I think, it has sold more than any other discworld novel to date.

I am getting lots of mail about the book, but I don't think there has been any really negative comments. It is dark and people do get killed, so the humour is closer to the humour of M*A*S*H. It's the humour that comes out of bad situations. Also, there is a bloody revolution, there's secret police, there's a torture chamber. You can't place too many gags into those situations.

Lord of the Rings is incredibly dark. Lots of really bad stuff happens to people, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. A dark book, a truly dark book, is one where there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Where things start off going bad and carry on getting badder before they get worse and then it's all over.

I am kind of puzzled by the suggestion that it is dark. Things end up, shall we say, at least no worse than they were when they started ... and that seems far from dark to me. The fact that it deals with some rather grim things is, I think, a different matter. LOTR deals with some grim things, not that I am suggesting that there is any similarity between the two books.

SFC: From what I've read so far, I must admit, I haven't thought it was any darker than any of the other books you've written.

Pratchett: It's much closer to something like 'The Fifth Elephant' than it is to 'The Colour of Magic'. There's no doubt that one of the reasons why 'Discworld' has survived so long and so well is that it does change. It has evolved. Because if this was the thirtieth 'Discworld' book about Rincewind and the Luggage, I would be prepared to slit my wrists ... and I don't think the series would have too many readers in any case.

SFC: Is there any subject you wouldn't parody or satirise?

Pratchett: Well, there's not a whole lot of laughs in paedophilia is there? I don't know who said this - I know it wasn't me - but they said there's nothing you can't make a joke about, but there are quite a few things that you shouldn't make a joke about.

For example in 'Nightwatch', Vimes breaks into a secret police torture chamber and finds the cells where the prisoners are kept. While nothing is described, the scene pulls the right levers to get your imagination working. The point was, if I had filled the torture chamber with the comfy chair and soft cushions from Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch for a laugh, that would have been an obscenity.

We know there are such people as secret police and we know there are such things as real torture chambers in the world today and sometimes you just have to say this. So there are, you always have to be careful. You have to feel your way and make decisions as you go.

The one thing you can't do too often is what I call 'The A-Team'. Of course, you're far too young for the A-Team.

SFC: No, no, I'm not, I remember 'The A-Team'.

Pratchett: You may recall that the A-Team would machine gun the bad guys car for about five minutes, then everyone would get out and walk away. They're probably responsible for rising gun crime all over the western world. Telling kids there's five Uzi's worth of concentrated fire on that car and the bad guys get out, and one of them has hurt his leg.

SFC: My wife asked me to ask you this because she has just finished 'The Truth' ... seeing as you used to be a journalist, which character do you think you are closer to journalistically, Cut-my-own-throat Dibbler or William De Worde?

Pratchett: Oh, William De Worde. Large parts of 'The Truth' are based on my experience as a young journalist. Not the bit with the vampires, obviously, but William De Worde's whole approach and his complete sense of bewilderment that now, just because he's got a notebook and a pencil, he has got this amazing amount of power. There are some scenes in 'The Truth' that are actually based on things that happened to me when I worked on a newspaper. Are you a professional journalist?

SFC: I am not. This is purely voluntary.

Pratchett: Okay, because I've been interviewed by lots of journalists saying that happened to me, this happened to me. Anyone who has ever worked on a local paper has had to deal with the unusual shaped vegetable story.

SFC: The last children's book you wrote was 'The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents', which got a lot of critical acclaim. Do you find writing children's books easier or harder to write? Or is it the same as writing for anyone else?

Pratchett: Harder, if you do it right. For all kind of reasons which are almost impossible to quantify but I would say picking something at random: kids. They are pretty media savvy these days. They don't know as much as I do because they haven't lived as long.

So whereas you are writing a book for adults and you put in a throwaway reference to the Beatles, for kids it really is a throwaway reference - you have thrown it away. The chances are they will not get it.

For example, in 'Thief Of Time', I've got the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, the one that left before they became famous. Now this is much funnier to adults who can remember there are a whole slew of people who left groups before they hit the big time.

With kids you have to be aware of what they are not likely to know about. You have to be a bit more careful with the language, you have to put in chapters which you don't do for the adult books. Ultimately, you have to write the books in a different way, but I can't really tell you what it is ... I just know how to do it.

SFC: Do you have any advise for budding authors?

Pratchett: I get asked this an awful lot. I think the advice that actually would work is: get a job on a television comedy show with a nice catch-phrase for a few years and then the publishers will fall over themselves to offer you a contract.

There's more truth in that than you may think. These days I think publishers like people who come with a certain amount of media weight behind them. There's Alan Titchmarsh, a TV gardener who is also now a novelist. Become famous doing something else is the answer. It's possible to get in that way. It's getting harder and harder now - and lets face it, it was never very easy - to get published just by sitting there and being an author.

Also, be young, possibly at university and keep reading. It's very strange, even when you take it with a pinch of salt, that some girl at university has sent half a novel to a publisher and they've now paid her two million quid. God! They don't pay me two million quid. And you never hear from them ever again! It's very strange. You never find out what happens to the book.

SFC: Do your 'Discworld' characters ever surprise you?

Pratchett: No, they may not do something I was expecting at a particular point, but subsequently as I'm writing, I realise that is what the character would do.

I think if you get a character working properly, three-dimensionally, then will react in certain ways according to the basic programming you have done. That might not be the way you initially would expect them to react.

SFC: Do you read reviews of your own books?

Pratchett: I don't go out of my way to, but I get sent huge wads of them. I get to see quite a lot.

SFC: How far in advance do you plan your stories?

Pratchett: It depends on what you mean 'plan' and what you mean by 'stories'.

SFC: How far in advance do you plot out your story-lines?

Pratchett: I never plot out the story-lines in the way you're thinking about. You know, 150 little cards, each one with a little scene written out. I don't do it like that. What I do is I write draft zero, which is a process I can't explain.

SFC: So you just tend to literally write ...

Pratchett: No, I'm just trying to assemble my thoughts to give you a clue. This is the man on the tightrope trying to tell you how he keeps his balance.

I'll start off with a couple of ideas and maybe a character and theme which I'll think about for a while: how will that work, well, we'll do this, we'll do that, we might need another character too.

You'll sit there and think about this for a while, then you realise you've got something quite interesting going. I start to write at that point and this is called draft zero. It's playing with the idea and the characters to see how it would work.

Sometimes it doesn't go very far and sometimes the concentrated process of thinking about it kind of retro-engineers your idea. The purpose of draft zero is like doing a big charcoal sketch. You can see how the story ought to be going and certain things emerge from the process. The writing is a way of concentrating the mind on the story.

In fact, quite often when it's going very well, I'll wake up in the morning and I'll have to start making notes immediately because somehow during the night, certain things have sorted themselves out. That takes up to two thirds of the time of an entire novel because once I've got draft zero well and truly sorted out, the first, second and third drafts are really just going through it on my word processor.

That happens reasonably fast because you've got the shape, you've got the characters, you've got a lot of the dialogue and it's really a case of almost sanding and polishing.

It's ridiculous talking about drafts in any case when you're working on a word processor, because I can go backwards and forwards. I'm writing the end of the next book now, very nearly the last scene. But I haven't finished parts of the middle, although I know what they are going to be and I know what has got to happen there.

It doesn't seem a strange idea to me to do it like this because, after all, movies are very seldom shot linearly.

SFC: One last question. What new books and projects do you have planned?

Pratchett: I'm just finishing a book for November which is called 'Monstrous Regiment' ... that's an adult 'Discworld' book.

In May 2003 there will be 'The Wee Free Men'. That will be like 'Morris', obstensively a children's 'Discworld' book. I'm planning to finish this novel and then have a bit of a holiday for a while, because I've been writing books back-to-back for quite a long time.

I know full well once I sit down thinking, oh I haven't got a book to write, what shall I do, I'll start writing anyway. I won't be under pressure.

SFC: Thank you very much.

Phil Jones.

QbaJak

wywiadzik z http://www.scifi.com/

What can you tell us about Monstrous Regiment? When do you expect the book to be published?

Pratchett: It'll be published in the U.K. and the U.S. in early October, and it's planned that I tour in both countries.

What can I tell you? Well, it's closer to Night Watch than The Color of Magic in style, and it's based on the old song/folklore/occasional historical fact of a girl who dresses up as a boy in order to enlist as a soldier and find her brother. I'm not going to go much further than that.

Word has it that Terry Gilliam has written a screenplay and plans to direct Good Omens. What have you heard lately of the film?

Pratchett: Not a lot. Terry is off doing other things while they still try to raise the money. Frankly, I keep away from it. Dealing with movie people is too much of a rollercoaster ride for my simple tastes.

What was it like to work with Neil Gaiman?

Pratchett: Takes deep breath to summon up the traditional answer: You've got to remember that back in those days he was only just Neil Gaiman and I was barely Terry Pratchett. I mean, we didn't spent much time going "Ooooh, it's sooo cool to be working with you!" We were just a couple of guys, y'know, who were friends anyway and had a lot of fun for six months writing a book.

Have any of your other books sparked attention in Hollywood?

Pratchett: Oh, yeah. You probably know about Dreamworks and the Bromeliad trilogy (Truckers, Diggers, Wings) which is scheduled after Shrek 2. I feel good about that, if only because they've given me a large wad of cash which I don't have to return. There's sporadic interest in Discworld as a movie, and I could have sold options over and over again, but there's not yet been a deal I'm happy about. A key issue isn't the movie but the spin-off—I'm not in a hurry to hand Discworld over to merchandisers, and I don't need the money.

What is the secret of a successful collaboration?

Pratchett: With Neil it was a genuine collaboration, and we were having such a great time doing it we didn't care much about the mechanics of it beyond the problem, in those pre-Net days, of making sure we both had up-to-date copies of the text.

The other things have involved Discworld, and I'm the boss. That's the secret. You'd be surprised at how much of the work I do, even so. Discworld is mine.

Your books have been translated into numerous languages—you are read all over the world. Your sense of humor travels well across international boundaries. Do you need to keep that international audience in mind as you write? Do you work closely with any of the translators?

Pratchett: No. Some of them contact me with questions, which is fine, but this had to be their choice. The way I see it, if I was capable of telling translators their job, I should be doing it.

I don't think "Wow, better make sure the Germans will get this" as I write. Generally, humor travels well—some of the best Discworld plays I've seen have been in Germany and Prague!.

Your work has appeared on audio-tapes, in animated form, as computer games—the list goes on. What entertainment forms haven't you conquered yet? What plans for new developments are in the works?

Pratchett: Most of that stuff has been done well but on a fairly small scale, and is about as much as you can expect for what is, still, a book-based thing. I don't see how it can go much further.

Your brand of fantasy works for people who ordinarily don't like fantasy. This is because of the humor, for the most part, and also because the characters have more modern mindframes and concerns. Of all of your characters, which three are your favorites? Are any of them based, to some degree, on people you know?

Pratchett: All of them are based on people I know to some degree, but it can hardly be otherwise, and I know a lot of people. There are one or two minor characters squarely based on friends of mine, but the rest are patchworks. Besides, if you've watched lots of people for decades, making new ones from scratch out of raw materials is not too hard. "Favorites" are people like Granny Weatherwax, Commander Vimes and Susan, because slightly screwed-up people are more fun.

You have written over 20 Discworld books in 20 years.

Pratchett: Er ... 30 books. They do mount up, don't they...?

How do you keep the series fresh for yourself and the readers?

Pratchett: By changing it all the time. Evolving. I've got this "wacky, zany" rep, but if you read Night Watch, say, you won't find much wack and very little zane. The books are still all by the same guy, though. The humor is still there, but it's closer to MASH than Python.

And how do you keep track of all those characters and places?

Pratchett: You think I keep track?

Tell us about "The Hades Business"—your first published story. What was that story about? Was that your very first acceptance, or were there any others before it?

Pratchett: Wrote it as a class project, the kids liked it, sold it to John Carnell at New Worlds Science Fiction, one of the three fully-pro mags we had in those days (early '60s). First story, first sale. I've always been a bit embarrassed about that. I'm sitting here on a stack of money in a big house so I can't really complain that I did things wrong, but I sometimes wish I'd done more between then and 1982 than write a novel every five years. On the other hand, I suppose I was absorbing stuff! Oh, and getting a life and running a career ....

Soul Music was your first book published in the United States in 1995. Why did it take over a decade to make it to America?

Pratchett: The fact that you truly believe this is revealing. In fact Discworld was published back in the late '80s, by St. Martin's Press and Roc/NAL, starting right at the start with The Color of Magic. It was not done well, it was done without anything much in the way of publicity, and the books were published well after the U.K. editions and limped along and were hard to find even by the faithful core of fans. It really was weird—I was all over the bookshops in the U.K. and Australia and Germany and so on, but in the States, nada.

But various things happened around the mid-'90s. Sales had been growing, despite everything. Publishers became aware of the huge grey market in hardcover imports from the U.K., caused by fans were not prepared to wait a year or more for the U.S. edition. And so, slowly, the act was pulled together. But I don't think it really got there until around 1999, when people high up at HC started to take a real interest. Since then, it's been close to perfect. I work with the U.K. and U.S. editors at the same time, they publish at the same time, and there's a lot more U.S. publicity and interest. And readers, too, so that all the backlist is coming back.

Did you ever want to be a musician or do you play an instrument?

Pratchett: Nope. Can't play a note.

Have any interesting fan stories? Ever have a fan send you an unusual or interesting gift? No stalkers, hopefully!

Pratchett: Well, a fan in New Zealand, a paleontologist, had a species of fossil turtle named after me. And, sure, I get all the usual fan stuff (including a christening robe for Lady Sybil's baby) and a throwing axe from a fan in Finland who makes them, and kids send me slices of their Discworld birthday cake (which I'm slightly more cautious about since the famous Cannabis Cake incident) and fans get married with Discworld rings and Discworld wedding cakes ... all this is, in a way, kind of normal. I don't get the seriously weird [stuff] that some people get ... hang on, I did mention the christening robe, didn't I ...

There's been a bit of stalking, but we're not talking big kitchen knives here. Just occasionally, in the broad sea of fandom, you find someone whose social skills are really from the planet Zog, but that is rare and is dealt with carefully. I remember when we were on a Good Omens tour, Neil turned to me and said "Aren't your fans nice ... " Well, his are nice too, of course. He just gets more Goths.

Mythology plays a large role in your writing. You seem to enjoy it—do you wish today's world had more mythology? Or is there some mythology still lingering in our urban settings?

Pratchett: Believe me, mythology happens every day.

What was the inspiration for Carpe Jugulum?

Pratchett: I saw a sundial with "carpe diem" carved on it, and I thought "carpe noctem" would be a good motto for vampires ... and "carpe jugulum" just crept into my head. I wanted to see what happened if vampires learned.

How much of a role does the Internet play in your career and popularity? Do you do a lot of online chats to promote your work? Does an online presence help with all those sales in other countries?

Pratchett: I do chats only rarely, but I hang out on alt.fan.pratchett and my e-mail address isn't hidden. The Net is useful, that's all. I don't use it for promotion—after all this time I'm still too busy to get the Web site up!

You started out your career as a fan—are you still a fan? Are there any writers whose work you seek out?

Pratchett: I'll always read Steve Baxter and Larry Niven. I'm still a fan, although I don't keep up with the genre half as much as I used to and I barely read fantasy at all. I always tell wannabe writers not to read too much in the field where they work. Obviously you need to keep in touch, but a deep knowledge of the Old West or world history stands you in better stead than a shelf of other people's fantasy books. Import, don't recycle. That's actually wisdom, that is.

Besides Monstrous Regiment, what can we expect from Terry Pratchett in the future?

Pratchett: Another children's Discworld book (The Wee Free Men) out in May. And a book, title not yet settled, in the fall of '04. After that, I don't know ... But then, I seldom do.

Is there a big difference between British science-fiction fans and those in America?

Pratchett: American fans drink less beer at cons. That was the big revelation to me when I went to my first U.S. Worldcon in '98. If you wanted to find the Brits, they were always in the bar, which is the de facto fan/green room at U.K. cons. Apart from that, no, the differences are superficial. Fans are fans.

Any last words?

Pratchett: Not yet!

QbaJak

i drugi z tej samej stronki http://www.scifi.com

Well, the inevitable question is, what's next? The Fifth Elephant has just come out in the States....

Pratchett: Oh dear ... you write a book, and then the next day, "What's next?" Yeah, well, okay. The schedule is as follows. The Truth, which is about the Discworld's first newspaper, is due out in the fall, here and in the U.K. at the same time. Thief of Time, which is about nothing you could possibly believe, is due out in May 2001, or about that time. Not as yet [scheduled] in the U.S., because there's always been a hate/hate relationship between U.S. children's publishers and myself, is likely to be The Amazing Morris and His Educated Rodents, which is--we're not going to call it a junior Discworld, but it's a Discworld book actually written with the knob turned down a level, so it will be more accessible to the younger market. Also coming out at Christmas of next year will be The Last Hero, and that's almost certainly going to be released in the U.S. and the U.K. at the same time. Very big, very illustrated. Extremely so.

When you say "very big," do you mean dimensionally?

Pratchett: Well, yes, the normal three, you know. I mean, we're talking about the size of Dinotopia. Like Dinotopia, the story will be told in the pictures as well. Unlike Dinotopia, it'll actually have a good storyline, and better artwork.

I understand the next couple of Discworld books are going to introduce a completely new set of characters?

Pratchett: The Truth involves new characters as major characters, with hitherto major characters as minor characters. The Truth is a newspaper novel, and you always have to have the cops in a newspaper novel. So you see Vimes, but from someone else's point of view. Now, we know Vimes, and what a good lad he is, etc., yay. But seen from other people's points of view, and they might have different opinions of what civil liberties actually involve.

And the ones from there...?

Pratchett: The next one is Thief of Time. I'm not quite certain which of the characters will be involved in it as yet, since I'm only a quarter of the way into it. I know there will be major characters in it, but only one of them's turned up yet, and only for the space of a few lines. One of the things the book will do is resolve any slight problems of temporal arrangement that there may have been in the Discworld series. Munchkins write to me and say, "Oh, look, on page 134, in the current book, you distinctly say--but in Guards, Guards! on page 192, it's clear that it's at least three years later, therefore you've got it wrong!" [Makes aggravated munchkin-strangling gestures.] However, I will now have an out. I will tell you this much: one of the things Thief of Time talks about is an event which actually caused the timeline of the Discworld to crash, and the pieces were picked up and stitched together again as best they could. There's a whole industry, the Monks of History, who are dedicated to taking responsibility for all this. ... For example, no one seems to be bothered that the leading theater in Ankh-Morpork is about as sophisticated as Shakespeare's Globe Theater, and it's just down the street from the Opera House, which is practically Victorian. And everyone accepts this as perfectly normal. Because human beings do. It's amazing what human beings will accept as always having been there.

It sounds like you work a fairly long way in advance of yourself.

Pratchett: Well, right now I've got two children's--well, let's say young adult--books planned, but I only have the haziest outline of how they're going to go. But I know for a certainty that they're going to work. I can sense it, in a way.

What's the process like for you? Do you start out by saying "I'd like to write a book about the opera" and then explore how it would fit into Discworld?

Pratchett: No--since you mentioned, or implied, Maskerade--that one started in a state of quiet fury at Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Phantom killed innocent people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now according to The Phantom of the Opera the musical, this is okay, as long as you look good in a mask and a tux and in the end you give it all up for lurrrrve. And I don't think so! I don't think that's the case! In the original book, he's far more a monster, and in the Lon Chaney film he's far more monster. You can't just dismiss the fact that people got killed. I've got a puritanical streak in me, I'm afraid. So I read the original work and saw the movie, and I knew there was a story there. I had a fan who works for the Royal Opera House who smuggled me behind the scenes for an hour, and every minute was worth its weight in gold. I discovered what an insane world opera is, and from there, 'twas but the work of a moment, the plot unrolled in front of me.

Do you start with a core idea for each book, then work from there to decide which characters to pull in?

Pratchett: Other ideas crowd in. For example, Thief of Time, the very, very original idea--explaining the discrepancies in the timeline, that's a side thing--came when I read a newspaper story about a clock made entirely out of glass by a guy in Germany. I think he had to make one small part out of metal. And for some reason, that stuck in my mind, the clock of glass. I played around with the ideas, then phoned up a professor of mathematics who's also a Discworld fan, and told him, "I want a guy to build a clock that's completely accurate, what's the smallest unit of time there could be?" "Ah, this is Planck's whatever, the shortest amount of time that the smallest possible thing could happen in, like an atom thinking of changing its mind about moving a little bit." They actually have a theoretical concept of time that I felt was quite a good theory of time for the Discworld universe. Never have I had such a visualization of the imagery in a book ahead of time.

Do you have strong images in your head of what the characters look like?

Pratchett: Oh yeah, yeah.

How do the various screen adaptations measure up to your internal images?

Pratchett: I really loved Truckers. It wasn't what I had in mind, but it was very good for what it was, and a lot of time and patience was taken to get the voices right. The fact that it might not have been exactly what I imagined doesn't even matter. In some cases it was better. I thought you could say as much about the animation: it was about as good as it could be, given the fairly limited budget and so forth. And again, for the U.K., it had a high-powered cast of voices behind it, and they really gave it something.

Why were Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters chosen for animated adaptations?

Pratchett: They chose Wyrd Sisters because it was accessible, in the sense that everyone knows the story of Macbeth. So the idea of witches meddling in the affairs of a kingdom brings a certain amount of baggage with it, and it was felt that that would be a good introduction to [Discworld], which is probably quite true. They said they wanted to do Soul Music because rock 'n' roll was also accessible. They came up with things I wouldn't have thought of, like they do every number in a different classic rock 'n' roll style, including, I kid you not, the Blues Brothers number. There's the Hendrix number, the Beatles number--and they actually had some numbers specifically written for them. "She Won't Change Her Mind"--it sounds like something off the B side of a Beatles album. They're magnificent.

So this is an example of something you hadn't visualized yourself?

Pratchett: Because I wasn't visualizing it that way. But because they said we had to have music, it was just a short step to having different types of music--the flower power number, the Hendrix number, the heavy metal number, and the bit at the end with the harp, which sent tears running down my face. It was poignant, with extra "poig."

Are there any other books you'd particularly like to see animated?

Pratchett: Well, I got on very well with Cosgrove-Hall, and we sold loads and loads of videos, and then the television promptly screened them at one in the morning, shoving them into sort of a fantasy limbo. At the time, I was a big-selling author in the U.K.--it's not like there were no fans out there. One reason it happened was that the commissioning editor, who was behind it all the way, moved. And that means we went through a process known as "orphaning." No one was going to earn any kudos from getting behind any project that was started by a person now gone. They're going to downgrade that one because their own projects are important. And I was so fed up with this. I said, "We all put a lot of time, money and effort into this, and we got chucked out. The hell with it." They were planned to go on around 5 o'clock on Sunday, which is kind of children's television but kind of adult at the same time. And I thought that was a good slot for it, because there was the occasional risqué bit, though it was so minor, you could hardly object. I mean, at one of the rock 'n' roll festivals, in the far distance, you can see a young lady with her top off.

There was also going to be a film adaptation of your novel Mort at some point.

Pratchett: That may still happen. The curious thing is, it's spent about nine years going through Development Heck. It nearly happens, then something goes wrong again, someone moves between one of the consortiums or something, some film studio is behind it and then someone else takes over and they want to close it down. Americans are interested in it in different circumstances and at different times. There doesn't seem to be much made in Britain apart from by the production company that owns the thing, and they're really only interested in making gritty, realistic stories about drunken Scotsmen and naked steelworkers, or anything that you can put Hugh Grant in. They can't get their heads around fantasy very well.

Do you worry about commercialism? There's also been a Discworld CD, the computer games, the merchandising?

Pratchett: You say that blithely, but most of the merchandising--what you'll find out about it if you're a fan, it's not like you're going into a High Street shop and there's all this Discworld merchandising. All the T-shirts are produced by people that were fans with some financial competence, fans who could get it together enough to go and get a good painting printed onto a shirt. The Discworld scarf, for example--which is going to be stopped very soon, so it'll suddenly become very valuable to those who have got it--when Stephen [Briggs] and I did the Discworld Companion, he actually had half a dozen of them made by the someone in Oxford who makes real university scarves. University scarves are in the U.K. what university sweatshirts or whatever are here. The fans heard about this, and the next thing you know they were clamoring for them, and we've sold a couple of thousand probably. But that's it. It's that kind of level. It's not the kind of stand-up merchandising that you get for Star Wars or even Star Trek.

Because of the lack of aggressive marketing, or because of the small purchasing scale?

Pratchett: I'm very happy keeping it small-scale. There's less money sloshing around and people aren't likely to get greedy.

How much involvement do you generally have with spin-offs of your work?

Pratchett: Well, with Johnny and the Dead, I wrote the script. With the games, quite a lot, but it's getting less and less with each game. But generally more than you might expect. Bearing in mind that the money I get from doing things like that, compared to what I could get for a novel, is infinitesimal. I give it far more time than it's technically worth. Because it's got to be right, or it's got to be as good as I can get it.

What's happening with the film adaptation of Good Omens?

Pratchett: Terry Gilliam is signed up to direct, which is great, because Neil [Gaiman] and I both feel a bad Gilliam Good Omens will be better than anyone else's good Good Omens. We've both had a horrendous experience with Good Omens in the past, and we're both keeping out of it. You have to be clear--the fact that Terry Gilliam is signed up does not mean it might happen. There's a lot of things he's signed up for. But people have got to get the money, and things like that.

Are you or Neil going to work on the script at all?

Pratchett: No! Neither of us.

Why not? You've both done script work.

Pratchett: Never boil your own baby. We both worked on the script last time, though Neil stayed with it longer than I did. But by the time--they wanted everything out that ought to be in. They wanted Adam to be evil from the word go. In other words, it just became The Omen! The whole point of Good Omens is that Adam is exactly between good and evil. That is the whole point!

And that's similar to what happened with Mort, I understand. The producers didn't think Death would be popular because it was too morbid, so they wanted him removed.

Pratchett: Oh yeah, and there have been other people who wanted far more conflict between Death and Mort, and like that. I mean, why? They kind of get on until the very end. You get jerked around quite a bit. You have to deal with 15 people with absolute power to say no and no power whatever to say yes.

Regarding The Fifth Elephant, is the title consciously a reference to the film The Fifth Element?

Pratchett: I was aware of The Fifth Element, obviously. I'd seen the movie [grimacing]. French. French science fiction, oh good, just like French comics. [affected accent] Oh deah. Verrah verrah stylish. It's probably how Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy should be filmed.

So why the similarity of titles?

Pratchett: Because why not? I thought it would be fun.

The Fifth Elephant seems to mark a progression in your work. The novels seem to be getting more complex as they go.

Pratchett: Well, not more complex. I would say darker. Like Carpe Jugulum was pretty damn dark. So was Jingo--I mean, people were dying.

Jingo seems like another turning point, as there's more morality edging into your work--you mentioned your puritanical streak earlier. It seems like darker themes and more powerful villains are part of that trend.

Pratchett: Yeah, because you can't have someone twiddling their mustache and saying "Ha ha ha HA!" But sometimes the worst villains are the people who think they're being good. One of the things I enjoyed most about Carpe Jugulum was when one of the witches, Agnes, sees a vampire's idea of how people and vampires can live together. Everyone is on a rota, everyone on the town comes to the square to give a little bit of blood. Much more civilized. And that's far more horrific, because that's doing it by the numbers. In the last century we came up with a very good name for people who inflicted terror by numbers, by lists.

But that seems far more typical of the villains you usually write about--people who mean well and just don't get the point, villains who are insane, villains who are laughable. In The Fifth Elephant you broke the mold with a villain who was outright evil simply for the sake of being evil.

Pratchett: Oh yes, Wolf. The point is, he believes "we are so much more important than you, you don't matter," and that happens often enough. You're right, yes. It's actually refreshing to have someone like that. It's actually refreshing to put Vimes up against him, and refreshing to see that Vimes can only deal with him if he puts a framework of law over how he's dealing with him.

Are you making a conscious effort to make your works darker, or is it just a natural progression?

Pratchett: It just becomes that. It has to be. In Esther Friesner's wonderful phrase, "You need tragic relief."

Does it take you longer to write a convoluted book like The Fifth Elephant than it takes to write a lighter, more comic book like Last Continent?

Pratchett: No, no. Well, it's hard to say. The reason there's been a slight pause in the books is that I've been doing other things. I mean, just answering all the mail takes time.

You're well known for personally answering your fan mail. And you apparently spend a lot of time reading the Usenet group alt.fan.pratchett.

Pratchett: Not on alt.fan.pratchett for the last year. Ostensibly, the reason is that it's no longer healthy for an author to hang around a newsgroup where people are saying "Well, I think it would be a very good idea if so-and-so happened, and then so-and-so happened, and then so-and-so happened." Because there have been one or two cases where people came very very near to second-guessing what I would like.

So you mean it's not legally healthy for you?

Pratchett: Well, not legally as such. I think legally I would be okay with 99 percent of the people there. But there's going to be some lackwit who says "He stole my idea!" and all he needs is a sympathetic ear in the media, and it can look bad, whether or not there's any legal aspect. People don't understand about ideas. There are people who think "Why don't you do a Discworld novel about pirates?" is giving me the idea for a novel. But there's also the fact that I've been on it for, God, eight years now, and I just thought "The hell with it, I just don't think I can keep doing this." As they say, every month is September. September is classically when all the newbies get their hands on computers for the first time because they're going to school, or college, for the first time. Of course, now, there's so much Internet access that every month is September. Also, you have to deal with the people who genuinely don't know the difference between research, satire and plagiarization, so you get people saying Wyrd Sisters was plagiarized from Macbeth and the like.

There was a point when you said that one out of every three words you wrote was fiction, and the rest went into fan letters and the Internet and the like. Is that still true?

Pratchett: Yeah, it is.

Why spend so much time on it?

Pratchett: It's time spent on the business of being Terry Pratchett.

Business? Do you do it out of a sense of duty to your fans, or is it fun for you?

Pratchett: The best analogy I can give is rock music. You can spend as much time in the studio as you like, getting the album exactly right, but in your heart of hearts you know it's not rock 'n' roll until you take it on the road. Besides which, because I've been a fan, I'm acutely aware of the complicity between fans and writers.

Speaking of fandom, you told Neil Gaiman in a 1985 interview that you "hate and despise Trekkies." Is that still true?

Pratchett: No, it isn't. I made jokes at their expense about Trek conventions: "Trekkies are so low that they can walk under a snake, but a Blake's Seven fan can walk under a snake while wearing a top hat." There are variations that go on. But in a sense I'm slightly envious. People that have found their way, talking in a kind of Tibetan sense--Trek fandom seems to be a full and satisfying life. I'm happy for them. The kind of people who say "get a life" typically don't have any life at all. You look at some guy with friends all over the world--no girlfriends, maybe, but still a full social life, mainly talking about computers--and you tell him to get a life ... well, he's got a life. We've all got lives. If people are having a lot of fun doing something different from what you want to do, well, that's not your business. Maybe I've just mellowed. What I did object to is the way Star Trek was coming to take over the old science fiction fandom. Star Trek became science fiction, and that seemed to reflect badly on the mass of genuine literary, written science fiction.

Have you ever considered going back to science fiction, or had a story idea that could be expressed better through science fiction than fantasy?

Pratchett: Well, I have got one or two, and years from now I might get down to writing them. But I'm no orbital mechanics guy. Even when I write science fiction, we're not talking Niven and Pournelle, we're not talking Greg Bear.

Do you still have an interest in the genre?

Pratchett: Oh yes, I read far more science fiction than fantasy, I know far more about what's going on in the field.

What do you read for fun?

Pratchett: Thrillers. Good thrillers, like Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake. I think all good authors should read outside their field. Otherwise they're just recycling.

QbaJak

dziwny wywiad o dziwnej tematyce (jak na wywiad z PT o DW

) i pewnie dlatego Terry zdecydowal sie odpowiedzieć na pytania w nim zawarte

a do tego pierwsze pare linijek nokautuje wszystko =)
zródło: http://www.geocities.com/...t_pratchard.htm

FTL: Dear Terry, ...for your convenience, as we don't want to burden you with extra back and forth e-mailing, here our questions:

Terry Pratchett: Kind of you. But it's not polite to say 'hey, yo, we want to do an interview (in fact, a simple quiz, with you doing most of the work) and, before you even

have a chance to say yes or no, here are the questions'

Since I have a spare few minutes, though...

FTL: Why did you choose transgender topics (the female dwarfs striving to become recognized as female, the drag queens in "The Last Continent" ,

Sergeant Nobbs explorations of his female side in the recent books)? Was this motivated by political activism of your side for gay or transgender

rights, personal experiences or you being witness of struggles of transgendered friends or relatives?

Terry Pratchett: None of the above. The dwarfish issue arose originally out of the established fact that fantasy/folklore rarely deals with female dwarfs and acts as if they

don't exist. Ergo, females dwarfs exist and look like male dwarfs, ergo, their society does not differentiate between the sexes once the kids are weaned, ergo

this society is going to *very interesting* to write about when it comes into contact with human society. I have to admit that unfolding it, and exploring

the issues in my own mind, has been fascinating.

Nobby? Well, Nobby...is exploring the wonderful world of being Nobby. I've never though of him as gay; in fact, given his general repulsiveness, he

probably doesn't even get much of a chance to be straight:-) And the 'Priscilla' take-off in TLC was because a) it's a really great Australian movie and b) as a frequent visitor to Oz I'm always

amused at how firmly rooted gay culture appears to be there. And there were 'run on' jokes,

since as Rincewind's complete failure to understand what's going on, and the poor girl who's joined the trio to replace her brother...

(Pricilla – for all who did not see that movie, is the story of three drag queen who travel in a old bus, converted into a camper through Australia to give a performance in some desert motel there. A movie with lots of music (mainly by ABBA, great nature impressions and also aboriginals, trans/homophobic attacks, a family reunion and at least one love story)

Terry Pratchett (cont.): The people I know who are gay (and one transgendered, I think -- like the dwarfs, I don't ask people what they're not prepared to volunteer) are mostly

within SF/fantasy fandom which appears, at least, to be quite amiable about people's sexuality so long as they don't act like a jerk.

FTL: Do you think transgender characters are more common and more accepted in science-fiction/fantasy than in other genres?

Terry Pratchett: As above. Without a shadow of a doubt.

FTL: So far all your transgender characters have been male to female oriented (or female to female if one chooses that view). Can we expect some of the other direction?

Terry Pratchett: Let's start with the fact that I would not be a good author if I sat down and said 'right, I'm going to explore the issue of [fill in issue of the moment'].

This stuff evolves from the characters. It has to.

FTL: Did any of your publishers or lectors criticizes your use of such protagonists? How about letters from fans, was the resonance more positive or more negative?

Terry Pratchett: You must have a funny idea about publishers. The DW books make them a lot of money, and no one knows why.

You think they're going to turn around and tell me off? As for the fans, those interested in what is going on write very positively -- those who aren't, don't notice.

FTL: Did you intend parallels from Angua's, the werewolf's situation, in "Feet of clay" to the coming out problematic of gay, lesbian and transgender persons?

Terry Pratchett: I invented Angua simply because I could see the character depth available with

a person who is half wolf, half human and not at home in either society. I had

no other motive, but it soon became clear how the parallels were developing.

It gets even tougher for her in The Fifth Elephant...

FTL: Thank you, Mr. Pratchett

QbaJak

źródło http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/~jcp/pratchet.html

How did you become a writer?

I wrote a story and sent it off to a magazine and they paid me some money. It was as simple as that; I mean there wasn't any kind of agonizing I just did it.

Was writing something you had in mind from early on?

No I wanted to be an astronomer, because I thought that being an astronomer meant that you could stay up late looking at stars all night, then I found out that really you spent your time doing maths in a little shed in Cambridge somewhere and I've never been very good at maths. All science means doing some maths in a little shed in Cambridge, unless it's marine biology in which case you do your maths in a little shed in Southampon.

After I sold a few stories while I was a kid I thought oh it would be quite nice, but I realised that it would be almost impossible. I mean you can't set out to be a writer so I got a job as a reporter on a local paper so I could make a living out of writing, I could make a definite living. I would be very, very suspicious of someone that just left school or university and became a writer I mean what the hell do you know about anything, you know what I mean, you don't know anything about life. I remember speaking to the abbot of a monastery who said "These days we don't like it if someone leaves school and decides to become a monk, we tell them to bugger off around the world until they are about twenty five so they know what it is they are giving up, so they can see something. We like them to come back later on and say yes I've seen everything, I've been there and done that and I'd like to be a monk."

I think becoming a writer happens in the same way, I think a writer is something you evolve into, not something you set out to become.

What was the first book you wrote?

The first book was the carpet people. I wrote it when I was seventeen, it was published when I was twenty. I was so ignorant about how you do this sort of thing that I looked up publishers in the local phone book and sent it to the nearest one.

Was it accepted straight away?..

Yes it was accepted straight away. Best days work that bloke ever did as it turned out.

When did you have the idea for the Discworld and what inspired it?

Well the physical shape of it is based on one of the myths of mankind. The idea that the world is flat and goes through space on the back of a giant turtle is one of the great common place myths of the world. I feel that I have always known about that I think I must have found it in books on astronomy when I was a kid. It features a lot in Hindu mythology for example. I just chose that because it was a naturally ridiculous world. I didn't think about it very much, I knew about the mythology and I just wanted a crazy world to set things on - the crazier the better, because I wanted the people to be quite normal but I wanted the world to be crazy.

Did you know at the time you wrote `The Colour of Magic' that the Discworld would become such a successful and long lived series?

No, I think it would have scared the pants off me if I'd known. I did it entirely for fun - I didn't know there was going to be a second. It wasn't until I'd written about the fifth or the sixth book that I had this feeling that there were going to be more. It was always assumed that I was doing one offs.

Have you got a personal favourite out of your Discworld novels?

That's like asking someone who's your favourite child. I've got a soft spot for `Mort' and `Guards! Guards!', but I like them all for different reasons. There are a lot of differences between the books, there not all the same kind of style for example.

Did it become more difficult to come up with ideas as the series went on?

No. That was a short answer. You've got to remember that for an author ideas are nothing. Ideas are as free as the air. People come up to me and say ( dim and enthusiastic voice ) "Do one about pirates!" and you think, but that's not an idea. That's just a thing, you know. They think if I give you the idea and you write the book can we split the money and I have to explain that it doesn't work like that. The ideas that make a book work aren't the big ones like "Do one about pirates," they're far more complicated and to do with characterisation and things like that. But, basic ideas like lets do one about pirates are easy to come by, you just sit there and think, it's not hard to do.

Do you find it difficult to work when you're sitting there with a blank peice of paper in front of you?

Well first of all I've heard about this blank piece of paper business, I've never done that since I could afford my first word processor.

No, if I have time to work I find working... to say I find working very easy gives entirely the wrong impression...

(trying to help) but you find it easy to discipline yourself?

Oh yes, but I'm trying to think of.. To say I find working easy suggests that it is just a kind of verbal diahorea straight onto the page... Errrm, I find it easy in the same way that a guy making chairs: he finds it easy to make chairs because he's trained to do it. Sometimes it's a bit difficult to do this bit, or you have to think about that bit, but you know what you're doing, you've got the skills to do it. So if I get the uninterrupted time, it's not difficult to do, just some bits are more difficult than others. These days it's actually harder to find the time to write. I have to fight to find the time to write, because even things like this; this is only a very short, few day tour, but some years I've spent as long as tree months in what might be called touring and similar activities. About one day in every four, and that is quite a lot, is taken up answering the mail and just doing the job of being a popular writer, it can almost become a full time job.

Do you ever see a point when you'll say goodbye to Rincewind and the Luggage and the others?

The Discworld as a whole? I think Rincewind and the luggage only turn up in three of them, and will be in the next one I'm doing ( now published - �Interesting Times� ), errm, I don't know, the point is last year officially the Discworld was ten years old. It comes as a shock to a lot of people who think it's about six or seven, but `The Colour of Magic' was published in hardback a little over ten years ago. Five years ago I didn't know what would be happening today - it's always taking me by surprise, all the time. So I haven't the foggiest what will be happening in five years time. What I think is going to happen is that the Discworld is gradually going to... I mean I've been doing two a year most years plus other stuff, I think it's gradually going to slow down and the alleged "children's books" and other stuff is going to kind of fill up the gaps. So that for me doing the occasional Discworld book will be a treat. That's what I think will happen. Otherwise if you think "Well my grandad lived into his nineties and he was quite compos mentis when he died," well that means that I've got another hundred Discworld books I've got to write and that doesn't bear thinking about.

The Discworld has spawned a lot of offshoots, are there going to be any more?

Well hang on, what offshoots are you talking about?

The things like the graphic novels and the maps and ...

The things that are floating about are the things like the Claircraft figures that they do ( shows prototype librarian library stamp ) and they are now doing the gaming miniatures. There's been the map, there's going to be more big comics, I hate the term graphic novel, there's going to be a computer game before the end of the year and a Discworld album, music album at the beginning of April.

Will it have the famous wizards staff song?

It will have the wizards staff song, a cut down version - full of single entendre. These are kind of natural things, I haven't gone out looking for them, people have generally approached me and there are other longer term plans. As far as I'm concerned the important thing is the books.

Have you been approached about animations?

All the time. Truckers was animated very well - a stop motion animation. There is serious - you see as you go through life about once a month someone comes up and wants to buy some rights. They take me out to lunch at the Groucho club and I never hear from them again and it's all very icky. But there is serious interest, like serious money and serious companies wanting to do it, in `Wyrd Sisters' which suddenly seems to be very hot amongst people who want to do things. Various people want to do things in various ways. `Colour of Magic', and also it's looking very likely indeed that `Johnny and the Dead' is going to be a live action television series. I take these things one at a time I mean I didn't think `Truckers' would be any good as a stop motion, then Cosgrove Hall did a sort of demo reel for me and I sort of sat there with my mouth open and said "Yeah, yeah, great, go and do it all". If people think they can do it well and are prepared to give it a go, you know, I'll be happy to see what they do.

How do you get on with the people you've worked with such as Josh Kirby and Neil Gaiman?

No, no, they worked with me.

Josh Kirby I don't work with, I mean Josh gets a manuscript. That's the only involvement I have, usually,. Sometimes I have to have a phone call.. I have a kind of atom bomb involvement, like I could veto it if it didn't work. I don't sort of sit over his shoulder and in fact it usually works very well. I did have difficulty with the cover of `Soul Music' where you have a story which involves Death and rock `n' roll. Now there are fifteen billion graphic artists and cover designers who would each do a book cover on Death and rock `n' roll, however this was Josh Kirby! I said "Josh, Josh you know about Harley Davidsons," he said "What's a Harley Davidson?" "Josh, have you heard of motorbikes?" "Yes." "Have you heard of rock `n' roll?" I had to explain things to him "Have you ever heard of Meat Loaf?" you know. In the end it turned out to be a marvelous cover, but we had to sort of educate him a bit on the iconography of late twentieth century popular music.

With Neil the only thing we did together was `Good Omens'. As I always say, for two people to work on something you need one easy going guy and one fascist bastard. Someone has to be in charge other wise the thing will just go all over the place and become two guys having tremendous fun. Someone has to keep in front of them the fact that this is a novel and so that has to be counter-pointed with that and that bit can't be too long and all the rest of it. That had to be me, just as if we were doing a graphic novel script it would have been Neil, because he's done zillions of graphic novels and knows how to do it and I haven't done any. I've done lots of novels and Neil hasn't so I naturally took the editing role. While we both worked on it I had to do more steering than Neil did, but I mean it was fun - we both had a lot of fun and we both swore that we'd cut our own wrists, no actually we both swore that we'd cut the other person's wrists, rather than do it again.

Are there any writers which you particularly like at the moment or influence you at the moment?

Probably everyone I've read has influenced me in some particular way. There's a writer, I mean a current writer, who not so much influences me, but if I saw his book on the shelf I would automatically buy it, is called Carl Hiassen. He writes kind of black, dark, humourous, police procedural novels I suppose you would call them; set in Florida. If you can imagine Thomas Harris with more gags and fewer bodies I admire his stuff, I like to read his stuff as relaxation. I think amongst the humourists the guy I always read at the moment is P.J. O'Rorke who really makes me laugh, but I'll read absolutely anything, I just naturally read.

What in your opinion makes your books so successful?

I honestly don't know, if I think about it I come up with a different answer every day. I'm not sure if it's the kind of question you should ask me, it's like asking the man on the tightrope how he keeps his balance. The last thing you want him to do is start thinking about it, because then he's going to fall off. I think one of the cornerstones is that people are slightly more intelligent than they look - I can put in a fairly obscure reference in a Discworld book and people will get it. I don't think the education system is quite what it's cracked up to be and people are doing a lot of educating themselves- from television and out of papers and odds and ends, like I did. What they know and what they don't know is very weird, you find people who don't know things that I think "God, everyone knows that," but are quite expert on something that I've never even heard of. I don't know, I'm just gabbling, I haven't the faintest idea.

QbaJak

Ľródło: http://www.bookbrowse.com...&view=Interview

An Interview with Terry Pratchett
Q. Night Watch is a dark novel. Would you agree?

A. For a given value of dark, perhaps. Fairy-tale dark, maybe. In a fairy-tale our hero has to walk through the dark forest, kill the monsters, evade the giant spiders -- but the important thing, without which the story could never be written, is that he emerges from the other side, into the light.

Q. Our hero being in this case Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch -- except that he's demoted to sergeant.

A. Yes, and the monsters are on two legs. But let's not give too much away, eh? There's a revolution, except that the people behind the barricades aren't revolutionaries, and there're murders and assassinations and a breakdown of law and order. And some laughs, I must admit. It's amazing how they turn up.

Q. And through it all walks Sergeant Vimes, having the time of his life as a street cop again.

A. Yep. Well put. He stands to lose everything, but there's a part of him that's gloriously happy. He's fighting dirty and double-crossing and using all his old skills to survive. There's no damn paperwork and people are trying to kill him all the time. In an odd way, a way he's ashamed of when he thinks about it, he's loving it.

Look, I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In The Colour of Magic most of the city is set alight. It's a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I could not do that quite so easily now -- and this time, we know that people are dying. But I think the books are richer for that. You need tragic relief. You need darkness for the light to show up. You need a way out of the forest.

Q. You need redemption.

A. Right. And that means you need to let in more than laughter.

Q. In Night Watch people get hurt or killed, sometimes quite nastily. Where does that fit into comedy?

A. Right slap bang in the middle, I think. There's humor in the book, but you can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing "The A-Team" -- if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

There was a famous incident during the Falklands War when a shell landed amongst some squaddies and one yelled "I've lost my leg!" and another one shouted back "No you haven't, it's over here!" And they were so high on adrenalin they all laughed. Humor turns up in strange places. It can unite people, and blunt the edge of terror.

Q. Is this trend going to continue?

A. Well, yes. It's been noticeable, I'd say, ever since my novel, Men at Arms, possibly earlier. And all it is, is me saying: supposing these people were real? Suppose that when they were cut, they bled? What's that Mel Brooks line...'tragedy is me cutting my finger, comedy is you falling down a manhole'? I still do the comedy, I just look down the manhole sometimes.

Q. So does that mean no more Rincewind?

A. No. He's useful if I need a viewpoint character. But the next adult DW book will, like The Truth, contain no major characters from earlier in the series, at least in big roles. It's good discipline for me, and you never know what'll show up. We're heading for 30 DW books now, and to keep it fresh I'm franchising it, only I'm franchising it to myself. So that's led to The Last Hero, big and illustrated, and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, which is a YA Discworld novel. There'll be another YA book, The Wee Free Men, out in May. And I'm trying new things with the adult books. I don't know if DW is the longest series ever written by one author, but it must be in contention. And the only way to keep it fresh is to let it evolve.

Q. This means you're writing books back to back, doesn't it? Don't you sometimes think you've made enough money? Don't you want to put your feet up sometimes?

A. I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them. But the late Douglas Adams said that the best time to start a new book is in the lovely warm glow you get from finishing the last one. It was good advice, although as far as I can tell he didn't follow it himself. But I do, and starting a new book somehow restores what the manic editing of the last book took away.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.

Q. Out of genuine interest, then, why do you write them?

A. Because I want to, I enjoy it, I sometimes have ideas that are too serious for an adult book, and it's a way of paying back or, perhaps, paying forward. If I thought there were kids out there who'll remember the Truckers trilogy, or the Johnny Maxwell books, or even Maurice as warmly as I remember books I read more than 40 years ago, I'd be very happy.

Q. The Amazing Maurice won the Carnegie Medal. Were you really surprised?

A. That's putting it mildly. I didn't think it'd be ruled out because it's a fantasy, but because there's a fair amount of humor in it. And humor is not something traditionally beloved of judges inside or outside the genre, believe me. God bless the librarians!

Q. With fantasy now perceived as being big box office, what is it that keeps Discworld off the screen?

A. Er�me, mostly. And the movie industry is helping, I have to say. The Dreamworks movie of my Truckers trilogy does seem to be moving now, but there's no Discworld movie currently in sight. Most recently FilmFour in the UK said Discworld was too "cerebral and genteel." Yes, that surprised me, too. And then their company collapsed anyway. Shame. And someone else said that Equal Rites as a movie would "look like a parody of Harry Potter." I tried to come up with an answer to that, but the top of my head kept unscrewing.

Anyway, after you've been around for a while, you learn that most movie deals mean�what's that lovely term�oh, yes: diddly-squat. Lots of people offer deals, but few of them seem to have the capability to get a movie made. They just want to own the rights -- lots of rights. Well, to hell with that. Sorry, I meant heck.

Something may or may not happen. It's taken half a century to make a decent movie of The Lord of the Rings, and heaven knows what's happened to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie now. Frankly, I don't think a Discworld movie is ever going to happen and, unless it does happen within the next few years, I'd rather it didn't at all.

Q. Why?

A. Well, what exactly would be in it for me? Money? I've got money. Fame? I doubt it. Rincewind or Vimes or Granny Weatherwax in bendable plastic? Does the world need this?

Q. The Fellowship of the Ring is widely regarded as a great movie, though.
A. I'd agree. Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. The Lord of the Rings is intensely�landscaped. But Discworld is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film. We'll have to see. I'm far more interested in the various theatrical productions, I have to say. They always seem more real to me.

Q. Are you working on another book?

A. Always.

Kevin

Jeśli to już się „gdzieś” pojawiło to ja przepraszam. Ot, wszystkiego przelukać niemożebnym.
Wywiad już archiwalny, z czerwcowego numeru „Nowej Fantastyki”, tuż przed wizytą TP w Polsce.

„NOWA FANTASTYKA”: - Co najbardziej utkwiło Panu w pamięci z poprzednich wizyt w Polsce?
TERRY PRATCHETT: - Jazda samochodem przez niemal niekończące się lasy; pomyślałem nawet, że zostaliśmy uprowadzeni przez elfy. Wyspałem się u was – jak jeszcze nigdy w życiu – w drukarni pod Gdańskiem. Ogromna tablica – nie pamiętam gdzie – pokazująca wielkimi czerwonymi cyframi zawartość zanieczyszczeń w powietrzu. Długie kolejki...

- Często zdarza się Panu być zirytowanym przez krytykę? Czy w ogóle przejmuje się Pan reakcjami krytyków na Pana książki?
- Złoszczę się wtedy, gdy krytycy atakują moich czytelników. Jeden z nich oświadczył kiedyś: „Wszyscy czytelnicy Pratchetta maja po czternaście lat i na imię Kevin”. Wspomniałem o tym kiedyś na spotkaniu autorskim, a wtedy bardzo dystyngowana siwowłosa dama wstała i oświadczyła z godnością: „W takim razie ja jestem Kevin”. Ktoś inny powiedział: „Nie to ja jestem Kevin”. A potem jakiś człowiek z tyłu zawołał: „Nie, to ja jestem Kevin i moja żona też!”. To niezwykłe, jak krytycy są skłonni atakować czytelników SF i fantasy. Nie ośmieliliby się na to w żadnym innym gatunku literackim. A przecież moje książki otrzymują mniej złych recenzji, niż wydaje się dziennikarzom. Poza tym te recenzje nie mają wielkiego wpływu na czytelników – ani dobrego, ani złego.

- Zdarzyło się Panu dowiedzieć od krytyków czegoś o sobie, o czym nie miał Pan pojęcia?
- O tak. Bardzo mnie niepokoi, kiedy uważają mnie za bardziej inteligentnego, niż jestem.

- To jakim pisarzem w młodości chciał zostać Terry Pratchett – śmiertelnie poważnym literatem, pisującym dla krytyków, czy autorem literatury bezpretensjonalnej, niegłupiej i zabawnej?
- Chciałem pisać własnym stylem. Nie śniło mi się nawet, że będę to robił zawodowo.

- Ostatnie powieści ze Świata Dysku są poważniejsze. Zabawne, owszem, ale humor jest tam raczej czarny. Równocześnie zaczął Pan wydawać książki przeznaczone dla dzieci – „Zadziwiający Maurycy...” czy „Wee Free Men”. Czy można to rozumieć jako próbę zrównoważenia poważnych treści zabawnych „dorosłych” książek i lżejszych treści książek dla dzieci?
- Musimy bardzo uważać na takie określenia. Większość ostatnich książek ze Świata Dysku ma już mocniejszą strukturę, w której rozwija się humor. A że akcja rozwija się często podczas rozmaitych wojen, byłoby dziwne, gdyby humor tego nie odzwierciedlał. Weźmy na przykład humor w „M*A*S*H” albo w „Paragraf 22”. Wiele osób uważa, że „Zadziwiający Maurycy” jest bardzo mroczny. Znam kobietę, która bała się czytać tę książkę córce (niektórzy mocno reagują na szczury). Ale dzieciom się podoba. Nie zgadzam się z teorią. Że książki dla dzieci są „lżejsze” od tych dla dorosłych – i nie ma żadnego powodu by tak się działo. Żeby mieć udane, szczęśliwe zakończenie, musi się w pewnym momencie pojawić realna możliwość zakończenia nieszczęśliwego. Zwycięstwo musi być osiągnięte z trudem. Potrzebna jest ciemność, by lepiej było widać światło.

- Czy w związku z boomem na fantastykę w kinie i po udanych animowanych adaptacjach Pańskich powieści są jakieś plany ekranizacji którejś z Pana książek? A może powstanie serial dla TP? Wiemy, że prawdopodobnie nie dojdzie do skutku ekranizacja „Dobrego Omenu” – czy mógłby Pan wyjaśnić, z jakich powodów?
- Jeśli chodzi o komediowy film na temat końca świata, to uzyskanie funduszy po 11 września nie było rzeczą łatwą, jak podejrzewam. Poza „Dobrym Omenem” nie ma obecnie żadnych planów. „Mort” był bliski realizacji w 1999 roku, ale potem coś nie zadziałało. Mógłbym sprzedać prawa do ekranizacji już „naście” razy, ale większość propozycji pochodziła od jakiś drobnych firm, które chciały mieć te prawa na wypadek, gdyby zainteresował się nimi któryś z wielkich koncernów. Tymczasem ja nie potrzebuję pieniędzy. Nie muszę się zgadzać na cokolwiek, z czego nie jestem całkiem zadowolony.

- Czy podczas produkcji animacji ”Trzech wiedźm” i „Muzyki duszy” miał Pan jakiś wpływ na ich realizację, scenariusz? Nie niepokoił się Pan, jaki będzie końcowy efekt?
- To były niskobudżetowe produkcje. Zazwyczaj jest tak, że im mniej pieniędzy wchodzi w grę, tym sympatyczniejsi są ludzie. Miałem pewien niewielki wpływ i dobrze się rozumieliśmy z zespołem. Muszę dodać, że scenarzysta był znakomity.

- W takim razie, gdyby w przyszłości doszło do kolejnej ekranizacji Pańskiej książki, wolałby Pan z filmowcami współpracować czy zostawić ich samych z tekstem?
- Oni zawsze mówią, że chcą współpracować. Zwykle po to, żeby skłonić autora do przyjęcia niższego honorarium w zamian za iluzoryczne poczucie zachowania pewnej kontroli nad dziełem. Myślę, że trzeba zaczekać, aż znajdzie się ktoś choćby częściowo godny zaufania, wziąć pieniądze i zostawić mu wszystko.

- Czy ma Pan wymarzonego aktora, który mógłby zagrać Śmierć?
- Christopher Lee, oczywiście!

- To teraz z innej beczki. Przy jakim typie prozy Terry Pratchett odpoczywa, zbiera myśli regeneruje wenę?
- Czytam bardzo dużo tekstów historycznych.

- Zastanawiał się pan kiedyś nad tym, co robiłby, gdyby nie pisał książek?
- Gdybym nie był pisarzem, nie byłbym „mną”, który odpowiada na to pytanie. Nie potrafię sobie wyobrazić tego, że nie piszę.

- Woli Pan psy czy koty?
- Koty.

- A jak z alkoholem?
- Bardzo dobrze, dziękuję!

- Piwo, wino, whisky, brandy, rum czy wódka?
- W odpowiednim miejscu każde z nich. Ale tak naprawdę to głównie wino i piwo. Nie lubię być pijany, ale lubię być... odprężony.

- W kuchni dobrze zaopatrzonej w naczynia, palniki i przyprawy budzi się w Panu mistrz patelni?
- Nie wiem. Ciekawie byłoby spróbować.

- Jest na świecie takie miejsce, w którym nie chciałby Pan wydawać swoich książek?
- Może Korea Północna.

Przełożył Piotr W. Cholewa

QbaJak

dawno nie wrzucalem nic nowego wiec chyba kolejn± serie czas zacz±ć

BookSense.com: There are 26 books in the Discworld series, yet they still sparkle with humor and energy. How do you do it?

Terry Pratchett: Sheer terror, mate, sheer terror.

Which one is your favorite?

Always the last book -- although I have a long-term affection for Men at Arms.

Your latest novel, Thief of Time, seems to be about second chances. Is this the beginning of the Alternate History of the Discworld?

You have to be careful with that stuff. It plays havoc with plots. Thief of Time was special.

The Discworld novels seem to happen consecutively (although Thief of Time shoots holes through that!). Are you tempted to go back and write interstitial novels?

They don't have to be consecutive within the series, only within the 'themes' (the witches, the Watch, etc.) I have one or two plans, but they're going to have to wait their turn. The next Discworld novel will be a Watch novel, though, otherwise Lady Sybil [who was pregnant at the end of the previous Discworld novel, The Truth] will have the longest pregnancy known to science.

Can you do okidoki or any other martial art from Thief of Time?

I know snafu...

Are you going to publish the Sayings of Mrs. Cosmopilite? (Do you like the way I easily avoid all the deep philosophical stuff?)

That is deep philosophical stuff...

Your readers in the U.S.A. are happier now that your books are coming out at the same time here as in the UK. Do you think your publisher will be able to keep it up?

Search me. Ask them. There's no reason why they shouldn't and the new crew seems to be working hard. I have to tell you that simultaneous publication makes it all a lot harder for me; two independent editing processes going on at the same time!

Why can't the same book be published in the U.S.A. and UK?

I don't know. That's just how things are. Obviously there are minor -- very minor -- changes in language, and both editors see the manuscript in a different way.

Are there differences in what the editor's do?

There are differences, but these are generally right down at the copyediting level. In my experience U.S. copy editors think Webster is God. I think he's just some guy, and his rules can't always apply in

narrative fiction. There's generally a few genteel scuffles with both lots of editors, and occasionally I'll go to the mat, but blood is seldom drawn.

Why are the U.S. covers of your books so different from the U.K. covers?

Because they appear to work. I can't argue with the numbers. Various cover types have been tried and failed in the U.S. over the years. Now, it might be that new style covers just happened to coincide with a sudden breakthrough, and given that HarperCollins did suddenly get behind the books and push this might be true to an extent. Whatever the reason, my sales started to build seriously around two years ago and are accelerating. Five years ago I'd never have expected to get a sniff at even the lower reaches of the New York Times list, that's for sure.

There's an argument that there are a lot of fantasy fans out there that don't like overt fantasy covers. I'm not getting involved in it, but it is an argument.

Do you know if your books for younger readers are going to be published over here?

I suspect that this is going to be the case, but there's nothing in writing yet.

Are you looking forward to your latest U.S. Tour?

Er...yes. For a given value of 'yes'. Touring, however good it is, and however much fun, is exhausting. And the U.S. tour is sandwiched between two halves of the UK tour.

Are there any places you look forward to visiting (or avoiding) in the U.S.A.?

I always look forward to a bowl or two of clam chowder at Jack's in Seattle. There are no dreaded venues, but let's see what this tour brings:-)

Are there any significant differences (besides nationality!) in your UK and U.S. audiences?

Not a great deal. I think the UK audience is a little older overall, but that's just because I've been bigger [here] for longer.

After Harry Potter, do you think general readers will be willing to give more good fantasy a chance?

Well, Harry Potter sure hasn't done my sales any harm. that's for sure. I think Harry Potter means more publishers will publish fantasy (at least, for children) but, on the whole, the answer is no. Arguably, the success of Harry Potter will mean that fantasy is seen as appropriate only for children, and that adult readers are somehow dopey. Certainly you'll find that state of mind is prevalent in the UK media.

What is it about the Discworld books that you don't write them in chapters?

Life doesn't happen in chapters -- at least, not regular ones. Nor do movies. Homer didn't write in chapters. I can see what their purpose is in children's books ("I'll read to the end of the chapter, and then you must go to sleep") but I'm blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults.

Will Granny Weatherwax ever receive the Discworld equivalent of an OBE?

Lancre does have a very small honours system, but I don't think witches go in for that style of thing.

Are you ever tempted to write under a pseudonym and see what would happen -- to your writing and the reception the book would get?

No. I'm probably too arrogant for that.

Do you have any more news on whether Terry Gilliam is going to film the novel you wrote with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens?

Deliberately, no. We're just letting things happen, or not happen. Best way.

Is there anyone else you'd like to collaborate with?

No. I collaborate as readily as a cat. Good Omens was a lucky accident -- right person, right subject, right time.

What are you reading?

Primal Fear, by William Diehl; Strange and Secret Peoples, by Carole G. Silver; and a bunch of books about Leonardo da Vinci.

When are you going to write that novel about the nuclear power industry?

Others have beaten me to it!

QbaJak

zaczerpnięte z http://www.actusf.com/SF/...pratchettVO.htm

Terry Pratchett
"I don't intend to write the official Last Discworld Book, but I may slow down"

Nous : What made you dedicate yourself to writing ?
Terry Pratchett : I never dedicated myself to it. I just started, and carried on:-)

Nous : Which authors have left their marks on your spirit, which ones have influenced your writing?
Terry Pratchett : Possible all of the, G K Chesterton, Mark Twain and Jerome K Jerome come to mind immediately.

Nous : There are many characters who return throughout the Discworld. The authors have often peculiar relationship with their heroes. How do you consider these characters? Old friends?
Terry Pratchett : In a way. You can't live with them for as long as I have without liking them. I respect the integrity of their characters -- that is, I cannot change them beyond their natures as they have appeared in the books -- but I know that they are not...real.

Nous : What keeps on you writing? Ideas left behind to be explored and exploited? Or the search for an absolute masterpiece?
Terry Pratchett : Habit, I can't imagine not doing it. -

Nous : How do you work?
Terry Pratchett : I just sit at my desk and write for several hours a day. I *think* about writing almost all the time. I don't have any special times, or chairs, or pens. I'm a journalist -- I can work anywhere.

Nous : You write mainly inside the Discworld don't you feel somehow locked into it ?
Terry Pratchett : Not at all. It gives me immense freedoms. And even the restrictions aid creativity.

Nous : Until where will you pursue the Discworld ? What could put an end to it ?
Terry Pratchett : Me dying. I don't intend to write the official Last Discworld Book, but I may slow down.

Nous : What did the cowriting with Gaiman for Good Omens bring you ?
Terry Pratchett : Er...half the royalties, and a lot of fun. It brought in a lot of new readers for both of us, too.

Nous : Do you consider others collaborations ?
Terry Pratchett : No. that one was accidental.

Nous : What inspires you the most. Books or events ? Why ? Which event of this last year would you like to grant a role in a future plot ?
Terry Pratchett : Events inspire me the most. As for recent news, well, we'll wait and see...

Nous : Yours books are successfull in France. One of yours translators has even been awarded a prize for his work on the Discworld. Have you special relationship with him ? And how are your feelings about France ?
Terry Pratchett : We exchange e-mails sometimes, as I do with many of my translators, but I wouldn't say there's a special relationship. I'm told the translations are good, and that's fine by me! France is fine. I have no problem with France. I keep getting invited to literary events but way, way too late to fit them into the diary, I'm sorry to say

Nous : I can imagine you receiving a lot of feedback. Was there any particuliar reaction by reader which has disconcerted you ?
Terry Pratchett : When a nine-year old girl said she'd read all the Discworld books. She had, too. I hope there were one or two references she didn't get...

Nous : You have a huge succes all around the world. How do you live with this fame ? Is it a source of anguish or hugely enjoyable ? Do you understand this phenomenon of popularity ?
Terry Pratchett : I just deal with it. I have an office to write in, I enjoy my life. But it's not like being a film star. To be frank, I enjoy writing and the fame bit goes over my head.

Nous : What do you expect from your workinprogress website ? Is it just a new extension of the discworld or interaction with yours readers ?
Terry Pratchett : I interact all the time alt.fan.pratchett and alt.books.pratchett, besides a hell of a lot of e-mail and mail and regular signing tours. I suspect my website will nev
er be finished -- I'm always working on a book. Website up or new book...let the people choose!

Nous : How did you feel first time you saw your characters on stage ?
Terry Pratchett : I have to admit I was entranced. It was like being given a huge train set.

Nous : Which question that you've never been asked would William de Worde ask you ? And what would be your answer ?
Terry Pratchett : The question would be: do you sometimes wonder what's happened to your life? And the answer would be: every day!

QbaJak

Young Writer Magazine
http://www.mystworld.com/..._pratchett.html

kolejny tym razem niepelny wywiad - o tyle ciekawy ze przeprowadzony przez dzieci z podstawówki

Terry, whose first book was published in 1974, was interviewed by Hannah Giannini and Adam Binding of Tetherdown Primary School in North London.

Did anyone tell you when you were young that you were talented or did you decide on your own that you wanted to be an author?
My granny used to say I was talented, but that's the job of grannies. I have to say I decided on my own. No one else can do it for you. But I like being an author. If I wasn't already an author, I'd want to be an author.

Do you write your stories by hand or on a computer? How long does it take you to write a book?
I write directly onto a word processor, but this is because from my early teens I've been used to keyboards. A book can take anything up to six months. I think a computer can help you write better or let you write worse. It depends entirely on you.

Are your adult and children's books different to write?
I don't really distinguish between the two. I just write books. There are differences in the writing, but it's hard to explain what they are-for me it's the feel of how I do it.

Which is your favourite of your own books? What do you see as your weaknesses as an author?
I've got a soft spot for 'Guards! Guards!' and I'm proud of 'Johnny and the Dead'. I think as an author I am all weaknesses!

Do you ever get writer's block? If so, what do you do to get yourself going again? Do you ever build up a problem for your characters and then not see a way out of the mess?
No, writer's block was invented by people who don't want to work at writing. When I do get stuck I work out why, and then try to unstick myself. Look, writing isn't easy.

Where do your plot ideas come from? Do they just come or do you have to sit down and really work them out?
Oh dear. Look, I just watch the world and read books and sit and think and the ideas turn up. I said writing wasn't easy-you do have to sit and work things out. A good start is to think how stories work and the feelings and thoughts you want to put in the readers' minds.

What gave you the idea for the Luggage?
I dreamed it up for a role-playing game about 27 years ago. It more or less just turned up in my mind.

Why do you like writing about little people?
Only in four books out of thirty! But in fact small people are fun to write about - because they live in a world which is our world and yet, because of their size, they see it in such a different way. That's the art of fantasy: showing people familiar things from a new direction. Familiar objects-or people or beliefs-seen from a new direction can often be more 'fantastic' than anything an author could invent.

Thank-you very much Terry Pratchett!