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commonality of mankind.” - Terry Pratchett
Sir Terry Pratchett occupies a double niche of fiction in Fantasy, and Humor. The two genres might have pigeonholed him out of the mainstream if they didn’t so beautifully reflect his world view. Pratchett was a master of satire, using his fantasy settings and near constant jokes to reveal the inherent contradictions and assumptions of our world. As seen in the quote above he picks at the assumption that our differences divide us on a fundamental level. He sees beyond gender, age, economic and cultural status, what your skin color is, or where you came from, to the truth of it all. We are all human, and if you thought about what that actually meant you’d realize that all the little differences that divide us are like an ankle-high fence. It might trip us up the first time we reach out, but if we try it shouldn’t take long for us to hop it. As of 2023 Pratchett has sold over 100 million copies in 43 languages across the world. It’s safe to say he hopped the ankle-high fence a long time ago.
History
Born April 28, 1948, in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, Pratchett loved the odd and quirky things he saw around him. He collected trinkets others might forget and busied himself with hobbies from keeping a greenhouse of carnivorous plants to building an observatory in the garden of his home. Writing was a young love. At thirteen he published his first story in his school magazine, which would be retitled The Hades Business and published commercially only one year later. He continued to write children’s stories for his local newspaper and dropped out of high school to become a full-time journalist.
1968 was a very important year in Pratchett’s life. While interviewing a local publisher, Pratchett mentioned he was writing a book, and the publisher passed the manuscript along to his co-director, Colin Smyth. The manuscript was for The Carpet People, Pratchett’s first novel. Smyth also went on to be his publisher and agent. More importantly, he married his wife, Lyn. Their daughter Rhianna was born a few years later.
In 1979, he changed careers to become a press officer for four nuclear power stations a few months after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in the USA. A decision he described as a sign of his keen sense of timing. If there was one thing Pratchett knew about writing, it was to leave your familiar places and meet people, to ask them questions and listen to what they have to say. Pratchett claimed he would have written a book about his time at the nuclear power stations, if he thought anyone would believe him.
In 1983 Terry Pratchett wrote "The Colour of Magic," the first of his wildly popular Discworld novels, while working as a press officer, and published it in 1983. It wasn’t until 1987 that he quit his job to become a full-time writer. Between 1987 and 2007, he had at least one novel published every year. By the turn of the century, he was the second most widely read author from Britain, beaten only by J.K. Rowling during Harry Potter mania. Never complacent, Pratchett lived his life as he wrote his characters. Full of personality and odd fixations. When offered a £125,000 advance for a single book, he asked for less because he thought it was too much. When he became second in the best sellers, he immediately asked who was first. Then declared Steven King wasn’t in the backyard fixing his daughter’s bike.
In 2007 he was diagnosed with Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s. He used the opportunity to raise awareness of the disease and donated a million dollars to Alzheimer’s research the following year. Realizing his approaching death, Pratchett spent the next 8 years rushing to finish his works in progress. He always intended to write an autobiography, but pushed his time into finishing several books, including one final Discworld novel, and the project never materialized. He passed away in 2015 at his home in Wiltshire surrounded by his family and his cat asleep on his bed. Per his instructions, a hard drive with at least 10 unfinished novels was crushed by a steam roller. He leaves behind his wife Lyn, and his daughter Rhianna, who herself has become an author. His last novel, The Shepard’s Crown, released the same month he died. It is a testament to how deeply Terry Pratchett touched his readers, that some have refused to read it so that there will always be one more book from him.
Terry Pratchett's Writing Style
Pratchett’s straightforward approach to writing is what made him so accessible. His conversational diction makes it easy to find the jokes and puns that inhabit every facet of his works and provide subtle commentary both on the characters and our basic assumptions about the world. Commander Vimes of Discworld’s city watch books, for example, has an obvious name pun rooted in Vim, of Vim and Vigor. He’s the blunt, workaholic police commander who’s nearly singlehandedly reformed the police into an inclusive and well-oiled machine, and in "Snuff" he’s forced onto a countryside vacation with his wife. Playing off Vimes’ inherent Vim lets Pratchett break countryside niceties and tell heiresses to get a job instead of waiting for a wealthy suiter, and gape at the mind-boggling stupidity of a policeman swearing to obey a council instead of the law. From a single pun, Pratchett derives a novel’s worth of satire and commentary on rural politics and social conventions. Every one of his jokes works like a door into a new layer of satire, building on jokes that came before and laying the foundation for jokes that come after.
Beyond names and puns, Pratchett used his fantasy setting to accentuate the absurdity of our reality. In his stories the funniest parts aren’t the wizards running their own university of magic and blowing each other up. It’s that blowing each other up is their form of politics, and the only way to get a promotion. His fantasy world is very different on the surface, full of wizards and trolls, but beneath the surface reality is perfectly preserved. The professors might be wizards, but battling for a promotion as wizards isn’t very different from the cutthroat reality of “real life” university politics. Many university professors have written to him saying as much. By creating a fantasy world where so much is different, what stays the same reveals to us the universal experience of being human. Pratchett draws humor from seeing our shared experiences play out in fantastical settings where things should be different, but aren’t, because people will always be people even when they are trolls and goblins.
Pratchett also made extensive use of footnotes, using them to expand on tangents about the world or a joke. Only a handful of his 41 Discworld novels don’t feature them. This is extremely unusual in fiction, where footnotes are usually considered a distraction. Many writers will even claim that a fiction novel can’t be successful if it has footnotes. Pratchett’s success with them serves as another trademark of his unique style. A footnote is supposed to be a quick aside done with purpose and including them in fiction is a distraction from the narrative. Pratchett used footnotes as jokes themselves as a comedic departure from the narrative, so their distracting presence is actually a feature of his work, rather than an unintended side effect. Breaking the rule of footnotes in fiction in such a consistent and useful way proves his mastery of English.
Write Like You’re a Blue-Collar Worker
Every writer has heard of the myth of muse. A magical force of inspiration that drives a writer to put pen to paper. The source of ideas. It is the god of writing, working through you to create a story. Some even say they can’t write anything without the muse. We’ve hopefully all learned that muse gives you inspiration but won’t write your book for you. You may have the most fantastic idea; but as Terry Pratchett once pointed out, “Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write them down and remember them, but at some point, you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty-five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.”
An easy way to get started as a writer is to write every day. It could be a journal entry, a shopping list, or a whole chapter. It doesn’t matter what you write as long as you’ve written something that day. It sounds easy, but becoming adjusted to frequent writing is an important step. If you aren’t in the habit, it becomes easy to put off for another time when holidays arrive, or you have a hard day at work. Writing everyday makes writing a habit and a hobby, transitioning you from a potential writer to someone who actually writes.
If you want to write a story, you need to treat writing like a job, because it will be a job. A full-time job that you won’t be able to do full-time without serious commitment and confidence in your ability. But it takes time to get there. If you’re already writing a little bit each day, then push yourself further. Set a word goal for 500 or 1000. Having a word goal gives you something to shoot for other than “I’m going to write today.” You should also record how much you wrote each day. Having proof of your dedication and unbroken streak of writing will push you to write even on days when it feels impossible. What you’re writing doesn’t have to be good, in fact, it will probably suck, and that’s okay. Just getting the words down is important. It's hard work, but once you’ve actually written it, you can go back and make it shine.
Terry Pratchett was a man who knew hard work. He wrote 400 words a day and published novels while working as the press officer for four nuclear power stations. When he finally quit his job to write full-time, he locked himself with only his cat for occasional company and wrote 3000 words a day. For comparison, this is 1000 more than both Stephen King and Nicholas Sparks. His mentality was to write like a blue-collar worker with a constant list of deadlines and projects to complete. If he wasn’t writing 3000 words a day, he didn’t do his job. It wasn’t enough to write, he had to get work done. This dedication is why he had at least one book published every year between 1986 and 2007, when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Even that couldn’t stop him, and he went on to publish several more books before his death. If you want to write a book, he’s the man to emulate. And if you want a writing god, I suggest Narrativia, a goddess of Pratchett’s own invention who smiles around her cigarette at writers who do their work.
Stand Up for Something and Do It Loud
More important than ideas, than writing, then selling even, is Pratchett’s firm conviction that you must say something. As an author, you choose to sit down and write your story. You must have had a reason why. Why did you agonize over every word if those words don’t leave the reader with something to think about? You have something you want to tell your readers, and if they don’t understand, then you aren’t doing a very good job.
The point of your story isn’t something you always need to plan ahead. Terry Pratchett usually wrote with a a few ideas and let the story sort itself out. Often it will appear of its own accord during the discovery process of writing. Your beliefs have an undeniable impact on your writing. Even if you aren’t trying to, the way you see the world will shape the world you write, and readers will pick up on that. Themes that seem to be nothing, but subtext might appear because you yourself couldn’t bear to write the details another way. You might worry about offending someone, but don’t. There will always be people that disagree with you. If you can make people despise your message, you have at least put out a message. And if someone disagrees with you, then there’s someone else out there that agrees with what you had to say.
In 1987 Terry Pratchett published Equal Rights and was so praised for his depiction a realistic teenage girl that many readers didn't believe Terry Pratchett was man. Pratchett was once asked how he could put himself into the headspace of a teenage girl, and his response was that, “We’re all human. We all get up. We all go to the toilet in the morning. I know everything. I’m a married man. I know everything that boys, or even girls do. The older you get, the more you understand about the commonality of mankind.” If Pratchett’s stories were about anything, it was the inherent humanity in everything. From an entire legion of female soldiers all pretending to be men and their commander who might actually be one, to the ugliest goblin enslaved in the countryside, to the inevitable but unjudging Death who communicates telepathically in all capital letters, everyone deserves to be respected, and no should be treated as less than human. This message is present in every one of his books and has earned him much ire from those who don’t share his world view. But Terry Pratchett never regretted this message, no matter how many priests, or politicians, or parents wrote to him. He knew what he wanted to say and said it as loud as he could.
Conclusion
Terry Pratchett’s death in 2015 was tragic and took from us one of the most talented and thoughtful writers of yesterday. His novels cut to the heart of matter. His satirical blade waylaid our preconceived notions about every facet of society from the police to our obsession with tracking time, doing little more than lightly tapping these monolithic entities until they collapsed under their own wight, revealing to us the bizarre reality we have constructed for ourselves. We can only hope that when he greeted Death, Death was as unjudging, and telepathic as he had been inevitable.
Terry Pratchett’s legacy sets an example of work ethic and kindness that every writer should hope to meet. We hope his writing advice and distinct writing style have left you excited to think about your own projects, what you what to say, and how you will write it. His brilliant work has touched the hearts of millions of people, and I hope it has touched yours as well.