Meet Terry Pratchett—royal knight, creator of Discworld, and one cool dude

It’s tempting to think that Terry Pratchett was born to write. With more than 50 titles to his credit, he’s easily one of the world’s most beloved storytellers. And with sales of more than 65 million books in 37 languages, he’s indisputably one of the most successful. The English novelist’s many honors include a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, more than a half dozen honorary doctorates, and the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and 2009 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nation (HarperCollins, 2008), which also nabbed a Printz Honor. Now, Sir Terry can also add the Margaret A. Edwards Award to his remarkable résumé. The Edwards, a lifetime achievement award that recognizes significant contributions to teen literature, is overseen by the Young Adult Library Services Association and sponsored by School Library Journal.

Although Pratchett first appeared in print when he was 13 (his short story “The Hades Business” was published in the school magazine), his literary career kicked into high gear with the 1983 release of The Colour of Magic (Colin Smythe), the first installment of “Discworld,” his wildly popular fantasy series. Featuring a flat world that’s balanced on the backs of four elephants perched on the back of an enormous turtle who’s sailing through space, “Discworld” quickly established Pratchett not only as a master of fantasy, but also as a first-class satirist. To date, he’s written 38 “Discworld” novels, including five for young adults—The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001), winner of the 2001 Carnegie Medal (Britain’s top prize for outstanding writing for young people); The Wee Free Men (2003); A Hat Full of Sky (2004); Wintersmith (2006); and I Shall Wear Midnight (2010, all HarperCollins). In addition to the first three of those titles, the Edwards committee also praised six more “Discworld” books: The Colour of Magic, Equal Rites (1987), Mort (1987), Guards! Guards! (1989, all Gollancz), Small Gods (1994), and Going Postal (2004, both HarperCollins).

In December 2007, Pratchett was diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Since then, he’s contributed nearly $1 million to Alzheimer’s research and been the subject of a BBC documentary, Terry Pratchett—Living with Alzheimer’s. Nowadays, the 63-year-old author lives in Salisbury, England, with his wife, Lyn, and their many cats in a home that he’s humorously described as a “Domesday manorette.” As a longtime fan of Pratchett’s work, I was eager to chat with him about his remarkable career, the “Discworld” series, and his battle with Alzheimer’s. But to be honest, the thought of talking to such a revered writer made me a little nervous. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried: Pratchett’s mellifluous voice, genial manner, and erudite wit and wisdom quickly put me at ease and reminded me why he’s such a genius.

“Discworld” features some truly memorable characters, including Granny Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, Moist von Lipwig, and, of course, a young witch named Tiffany Aching. Where does she rank in your pantheon of characters? Pretty darn high. She’s one of my favorite characters. I like her because she has this great wide streak of common sense and also a sense of duty. She rolls up her sleeves and she just gets on with the job, and she thinks carefully before she acts, as well. It’s funny, really, the Tiffany Aching books and the “City Watch” books are definitely fantasy books, but everybody who doesn’t read them assumes it’s just going to be wizards and witches doing the same old wizards-and-witches stuff that they do, and it’s amazing what you can achieve when you disguise it as fantasy.

I’ve always been impressed by the way the theme of good and evil plays out in the Tiffany Aching adventures. She confronts your typical fantasy villains—the Queen of the Elves, the Hiver, the Wintersmith, the Cunning Man—but the more mundane, garden-variety evil is just as harrowing in its own way. It’s the small things; it’s the things like rumor—it’s the small indignities. And indeed I would say that I Shall Wear Midnight is, in many respects, the most adult book I’ve ever written. After all, it does start out with a premature stillbirth, a drunken man beating up his pregnant and unmarried daughter, a man hanging—all this in something that is really a young adult book. It frightened me when I was writing it.

Humor doesn’t get much respect in literary circles these days, but you’re widely regarded as a master of it. The trick is that there are two kinds of humor that you can use. There is always time to praise humor and the reason for that is the commonality of mankind. Mother-in-law jokes work everywhere in the world, because just about every man will end up with a mother-in-law. So when we laugh at those things, we laugh at the commonality of our experience, and you can use that. It works best when the humor derives best from situation and personality rather than just going for the gag. As G. K. Chesterton—who was one of my heroes—said, “Humor can get through the keyhole when seriousness is still hammering at the door.” And it’s amazing what truth you can force into people’s heads by means of a joke.

In the U.S., there’s a debate about whether a series book needs to stand alone to be considered for an award. As the author of what’s probably the longest-running fantasy series in the universe, what’s your take on that? Let’s go back a little bit. I write the book that I want to write. I want to get what an author wants. He wants what every artist wants: first of all, to be enjoyed and, not least, to get paid. And in some sense, the money you earn is keeping score. It’s because the readers are out there. Well, heaven knows, they don’t lose any time in telling me they’re out there these days—you should see the size of my mailbox. The “City Watch” series is quite separate from the “Tiffany Aching” series and every book is more or less a stand-alone book. I personally have a lot of emotional investment in I Shall Wear Midnight. I have to say that Nation probably was the book that was the most emotionally tiring to write. I really fought my way through that book and it rather surprised me that it…. Well, let’s put it like this: I would have preferred that Nation had won the Carnegie Medal rather than The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. But on the other hand, it’s quite nice to think that I wrote Maurice for the fun of it, and because I’d done it for the fun of it, it won a medal. So the thing is—go figure—you can never know whether a book is going to be the one the judges pick.

I was a judge on a couple of the award committees that selected Nation for the top prize, so I have a soft spot in my heart for it. It’s an incredible book, and I know you’ve said it’s probably the best book you’ll ever write. I think it would have won the 2010 Carnegie Medal if it weren’t for Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. I’ve known Neil for a very long time. A whisker’s breadth, more or less, can separate books. I certainly never expected Maurice to be a winner. It was funny and it had some good things to say and I very much enjoyed doing it and it was a very knowing book, which I think people would pick up on.

You’ve said that writing for children is more difficult than writing for adults. What’s the difference? Well, there is one obvious difference. It would be ridiculous of me to refer to the Beatles to a generation who might not even know who the Beatles were, so you have to think sideways to a degree. You have to work out whether your audience knows enough about, well, I suppose, life, to comprehend what it is that you wish to say. It was reasonably easy in I Shall Wear Midnight, for example, because I pretty much knew that my readers would have followed me for quite a long time, for a period of four years. In that series and by the end of that particular book, Tiffany Aching, the heroine, was for all intents and purposes in her society—she was an adult, so I could deal with some quite heavy ideas, being reasonably certain that my target audience would be capable of understanding them. Amazingly, I find that children understand rather more than their parents think they do.

Yes, that’s been my experience, too. Can I give you a little anecdote? I had a letter from an American mum who said she found it very harrowing to read The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents to her little girl who was seven, and she noticed she was getting rather more upset than her child was. The little girl patted her on the hand and said, “Don’t worry, mum, it will all turn out right.” And that showed, I think, that the little girl had grasped one of the rules, which is that if you’re writing for kids you can to a certain extent drag them through this dark and fearful night and that’s perfectly OK if there’s sunshine at the end.

When you were growing up, you worked in a library. Which books made the deepest impressions on you? Well, you have to remember that because I didn’t really discover the library until I was about nine or ten, I read everything that I thought was going to be interesting regardless if it was for adults or for children. In those days, there was still just an idea that a child who went into the adult library should be kept under some surveillance. And indeed in one of the local libraries, children were not allowed in the adult library until the librarian thought they should be allowed. But since I was working in the library that meant that I was de facto an adult and so I read, I think, the very best of everything. I particularly treasured Mark Twain. And, on the other hand, I found the works of Tove Jansson, who wrote the “Moomintroll” books. The nice thing about them was that although these books were clearly for children, adults could read them with every pleasure and indeed they were the kind of books that helped children grow up. They had a terminology and an aspect of life which were very valuable. She wrote for children, but she certainly didn’t write down to them.

Some of your books have been adapted for stage and television. How about the movies? Are there any major studio releases in the works? Well, these things get talked about. But I rather like the TV stuff, because I can keep a certain measure of control. If you’re working with a fairly low-budget TV show, they quite like input from me because I know about the subject in depth, and I’ve gotten on very well with the people I’ve worked for. Whereas, the chance of getting much input into anything that has really big, big bucks in it is very small. In those cases, what you’re supposed to do is take the money and go and hide somewhere and don’t try to mess with the big boys. It might happen. We shall see.

Your next book, Snuff, will be published in October. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Absolutely. Snuff has got nothing to do with pornography, but it’s about issues that will be familiar to us in the modern world, and issues facing the police, and a number of similar issues. It’s a “City Watch” one, and it will pivot almost entirely on Samuel Vimes.

Are there any more young adult books on the horizon? I have one planned, I must say, probably a stand-alone. However, my Alzheimer’s is the kind called posterior cortical atrophy, which in a sense is much, much better than what we call the normal Alzheimer’s—although they all end up pretty much the same way. So how long I can go on and how many books get written really depends on my health. I intend to keep going on until I can’t go any further, and then, regrettably, I will stop.

How has the illness affected your writing? Well, sooner or later I will die, as all men die. Sooner or later, I will be alive but not capable of writing. So when I’m no longer capable, as it were, of interfacing with the universe, I will consider that as death. But right now, because of modern technology, I can dictate to my computer and, in fact, in front of me is a letter I have just been dictating. Mind, it’s not quite as good as using the typewriter. It has certain benefits because we are monkeys, chattering monkeys, and we like talking, and so I work better when I’m talking to the computer than when I’m typing on the typewriter. I’m telling the computer the story instead of writing it down, and it seems to work.

What does winning the Margaret Edwards Award mean to you? It makes me very proud, I have to say. Because, you know, when it’s librarians that give the award, you’d be so proud. I don’t know whether you know this, but I wanted to be a librarian at one stage. I got a job in my local library, mostly because that gave me access to all the books I wanted. I thought that being a librarian would be a very good gig until I found out that being an author was likely to be a better one—not necessarily for everybody, I must say.