Free A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett Page A

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 thinkare 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 acondom machine in Middle-earth. Well, actually, I can,