A Slip of the Keyboard (9 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The books I’m really most proud of having written are the children’s books. It was brought home to me today when I was talking to the kids, why this is. They started asking about the turtles. Then they continued asking about the turtles. And I said, “Okay, no turtle questions.”

They said: “Okay, well, about the elephants then …”

The thing is that when you write for kids you have to be more precise. You have to answer the questions. You can’t leave people hanging around. You can’t rely on them filling in too many gaps for themselves. But kids are also remarkably astute about narrative these days. They’ve got plot savvy. I remember my daughter watching a movie many years ago, she was about eight or nine perhaps, and it was an action-adventure and she said, “That black guy is going to survive.”

And this is about a third of the way through, and we knew it was that kind of movie where lots and lots of people are going to get killed. And I said, “How do you know it’s going to be him?”

“That guy’s going to survive, and that woman’s going to survive, and the black guy is going to survive because the other black guy got killed earlier.” Actually she was wrong, but her reasoning was spot-on. Already she had been working out how plots work, and lots of bright kids are doing that. So it really stretches me to write the children’s books. You have to stay ahead of them.

I think I have probably done great harm to the world of fantasy. Fortuitously, although I’m not very cerebral about what I write, lots and lots of people are doing theses and doctorates on me. So, apparently, I’m a postmodern fantasy writer. I think this is because I’ve got a condom factory in Ankh-Morpork. Admittedly, the troll that does all the packing wonders what the women are laughing about when he is packing the “Big Boys.” But you cannot imagine a
condom machine in Middle-earth. Well, actually, I can, regrettably. But you certainly can’t imagine one in Narnia, and nor should you. But the curious thing is Ankh-Morpork can survive this. Ankh-Morpork does survive most things.

I was told one day, by a fan in the business, that I could get a coat of arms.

I said, “Could it have hippos on either side of it like the Ankh-Morpork one?” “No, you can’t do that; you have to be either the Queen or a city.” I said, “Well, I’m personally not a city so I can’t, but I could do it anyway, couldn’t I? I mean, what happens if I do it?” “We won’t like it.” So I thought, “This is 2004, I could live with that.” But he really wasn’t impressed with the city motto of Ankh-Morpork:
“Quanti canicula ille in fenestra”
which does translate very nicely as “How much is that doggie in the window?”

Anyway, once the shuttle is flying again there are secret plans afoot to get the mission patch from
The Last Hero
on board it somewhere. I suspect that the Latin motto, when translated, reads “We who are about to die, don’t want to.” My contact tells me the astronauts would have no problem with that.

It has been tremendous fun. It’s made me a lot of money. I wish I was a real author. I truly do. I haven’t thought a great deal about what I’ve done. I’ve gone ahead and done it. It comes as a huge shock to read these theses, that sneak in at a rate of one every month or two, and find out about my wonderful use of language and the cleverness with which I do these things. I think “Nah!” I just do it because that’s what it’s like … That bit goes there because it’s impossible to imagine it going in any other place. And then they go and make me a Guest of Honour. There are far, far better authors out there, folks. But I thank you very much for reading this one. It has been tremendous fun. Discworld is twenty-one years old next month, which kind of means something in England, even now. Once upon a time, it was when you were allowed to drink. But now you are officially allowed to drink at the age of about eight years
old, although here in the United States you have to be thirty. But, somehow, it means you have come of age.