SOURCE: Pratchett, Terry, and Observer. “The Books Interview: Terry Pratchett.” Observer (24 October 1999): 12.

[In the following interview, Pratchett discusses his goals in creating Discworld as well as the influences that prompted him to become a writer.]

Terry Pratchett owns up to being ‘born in what is very nearly the last century’, living ‘behind a keyboard’ in Wiltshire and becoming an overnight success after 15 years of writing.

[Observer]: You're probably the most successful novelist in the world, in English.

[Pratchett]: I cannot possibly believe that that is true. I would make no such claim. I've sold a lot of books.

Can you explain the secret of your success?

Don't ask the man on the tightrope how he keeps his balance.

You've been compared to Dickens and Shakespeare, and yet the literary world's been rather stand-offish. Does that bother you?

The literary world's not actually been that stand-offish. There's a two or three-year cycle, at the top end of which I'm a jolly good chap and at the other end I'm the worst thing that's happened in English literature. In terms of stinking reviews over a period of 10 or 12 years, I think there may have been about six. Possibly more embarrassing are the effusive ones, saying: ‘Give him the Booker.’

What sort of novelist are you?

I'm a fantasy writer.

What was your literary career like before ‘Discworld’?

Well, I didn't have one. Indeed, I'm not totally certain I have one now. I'd written three or four books and to be frank I've never taken it seriously. With one of the few displays of real common sense I think I've ever shown, I decided at school that the only sensible way to make a living by arranging words in a pleasing order was by working on newspapers, because you got paid at the end of the week or the end of the month. So I got into journalism in the traditional way of a job on the local paper, the Bucks Free Press in High Wycombe. It was a good, solid thump on the doormat every Friday. About once every four or five years, I'd write a science fiction or fantasy book, which would get published, and would be known within the science fiction and fantasy genre and then disappear. And I thought that was more or less how it worked. I didn't think of myself as a writer in that sense; I was doing lots of other things. And then The Colour of Magic started to sell very well in the very early Eighties.

That was the first ‘Discworld’ and I'd already got a sequel in mind so I wrote that and that did even better. I was writing one every six months and by the time the fourth one came out it got to number two in the bestseller list.

It sounds like writing has come quite easily to you.

There are plenty of days where I sit there and really bang my head against the screen. But that is not the same as something that's hard or difficult. It's just intricate.

Do you write every day?

Oh yes. Well as far as I possibly can.

Who are the writers you most admire?

The writer who I was first acutely aware of as a physical personality was G. K. Chesterton. That was because he lived in Beaconsfield, where I was born. My grandmother remembered him. I must say she remembered him in terms of ‘big man with a squeaky voice’. My grandmother, God bless her, was a little bit like Count of Monte Christo. She had this four-foot shelf in her flat which actually contained all the books you ever needed to read. There were a couple of Chestertons, Conan Doyle's complete short stories, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea—key volumes she'd picked up over the years and I read my way through her shelves.

What about influences on your work?

It really is so hard. I think all of us in my curious corner of the profession probably have to admit to an influence from Jerome K. Jerome. If you weren't influenced by him you were influenced by people who were influenced by him, because he was a master of that tone of voice. Wodehouse was influenced by him and Mark Twain had a very similar tone of voice but with the American twist on it.

I used to buy bound volumes of Punch for half a crown from my local secondhand bookshop. I just read the whole thing like a buzz saw and it rubs off on you after a while.

Do you have favourite fictional characters?

The length of the pause indicates that I probably don't. In so far as one springs to mind it would probably be William Brown, from Just William. I discovered the William books when I was about 12 and I read them all and that was the first time I was consciously aware of the ironic tone of voice. I couldn't help but admire William, because I just hated all the other protagonists in the children's books I read. Swallows and Amazons always induced in me a terrible desire to be a pirate. I was probably a bolshie little kid, but not in a political sense.

I'm struck by the appearance of Death in your work. Is that a joke?

Death as a character? This is the reason why I call myself a fantasy writer and don't mess around with things like magical realism. You have so many sources to draw on when you're a fantasy writer.

You have an enormous number of fans. Is this a problem?

There are fans and there are readers, and I think the ratio is something like one to 15. By fan, I mean the people that would go and buy a T-shirt. The people that would buy everything, as opposed to someone just enjoying it. And I think a genre author has to bear in mind the difference between the fans and readers. You get lots of letters from fans, lots of letters from readers. If I actually listened to what the fans wanted after the first two books I'd have written the first two books over and over again, but I've done different things as the years go by and they've liked those, so they trust me on this.

Which country after Britain is most devoted to your work?

I do well in Germany and I do very well in Australia and New Zealand. Generally, a good starter is whether or not they drink wine or beer. I do better in the beer countries, though France is doing very well which has come as a huge surprise to me.

Do you mind being called a genre writer?

No. The critic Kim Newman said he believed there was a separate genre or para-genre or quasi-genre called genre humourist and he lumped me with guys like Donald Westlake and Carl Hiassen. I say yeah, I work in the fantasy genre.

And do you have a thought about what the point of fiction might be?

The point of page one is to make people turn to page two and if at the end of the book people think that the book was good value for money, you have achieved something, because if you haven't achieved those things you're not going to achieve the other thing. If people aren't going to get as far as page three then that vital insight that you've put on page 19 is going to go to waste and I don't usually publicly go much further than that. I certainly won't pretend that the ‘Discworld’ books aspire to literature.