Maskerade discworld script1/29/2024 ![]() But if you call them fans you can disenfranchise them because (the suggestion is) they are fans and they will put up with anything because they are fans. And there have been a great many of them over the years and on the whole they have been pretty favourable. (They have been) in some of the pieces that have been done. JG: Your readers are often referred to as fans, as though they were somehow different from readers. And occasionally you get one that makes you sit and stare at the wall for half an hour and that's good for you as well. It would be a troubled author who tried to follow the advice of every single letter from the readers. JG: Is meeting readers that important to you? Oh, yes it is and I do an awful lot of that. Maybe you can write the kind of book that will have the same effect on some kid now that a book had on you 40 years ago. JG: So you feel you are paying your dues? It's called paying forward, not paying back. And I met Arthur C Clarke - that was when you could meet him, the days when gods walked the earth – and I met quite a few other UK authors and I came away thinking 'these authors are people, I am a person, therefore I could be an author', which was a reasonably important revelation, I think. When I was 13 I persuaded my parents that a science fiction convention was very literary and learned with things for me to go to and I didn't mention the beer. ![]() JG: Were you the beneficiary of that yourself? Yes, I was, obviously. So there is a communication, which you don't get, I think, in any other genre. If you go along to, say, the World Science Fiction convention there will be writers' workshops and advice from senior writers and panels and so forth. I think that also the fact is that I grew up at least as a science fiction and fantasy fan and within that genre – and it's unlike any other genre I know - it's quite easy to get to meet on a social level some of the best writers around and indeed there's a tacit encouragement that you could be a writer yourself. This is, on the whole, a profession where you're encouraged to stay indoors and, indeed, not meet people. But probably it boils down to 'it's not rock'n'roll until you take it on the road'. I believe that signing tours are part of the whole thing, though if you then ask me 'what is the whole thing?' I'd say I'm not quite certain. JG: You have said you like the process of writing but what about the public relations, the book signings and the conventions? I look forward to them and I remember them with pleasure. The flow is not coming so you just sit down and graft until you bend the story the way it has to go. In fact that's the time when you're working at your hardest. You have to find out what's getting in the way but that's not writer's block. That's when you've gone down the wrong alley – you need to rethink things. Yes, of course there are times when you're stuck. It takes a week for any posing attempt at writer's block to be burned out of you. But there is something in that view and it would probably be better for me in the long run to slow down but I was trained as a journalist and so putting words in an acceptable order in exchange for money is kind of built in (In journalism) the concept of writer's block never crops up. But there is an upside which is that you get a lot of readers and you get paid quite a lot of money. ![]() ![]() JG: You are a prolific producer and in some critics' eyes that seems to render a writer suspect. There's about six weeks when everything is a bit panicky and then it settles down and there's just one book I have to think about. So I'm involved in that, plus around the time I'm trying to get the next book well and truly on the road. Then there's a book just going through the final editing and proof stage which is quite intense. In fact I'm in one of those what I call a node – they're one of those very strained periods of time because it's when there's a book about to come out and there's the PR for that I have to get involved in. I'm working on the next Discworld after the next one after Nightwatch because there's one coming out in May – what is officially a young adult Discworld - and we're just seeing it through its proof stage. JG: Nightwatch, which is just being published in New Zealand, is the 27th Discworld book. An edited transcript of a conversation with the best-selling writer Terry Pratchett in which he tells John Gardner some of his views on jokes, death, literary reputations and strange diseases.
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