And then there’s been the fans, who write me letters and invite me to their weddings and without whose constant interest and advice I wouldn’t have a clue where I was going wrong. They know when to take the joke seriously and let it become more than a joke.
But what is a typical fan? Can you spot them? Some can. Those of you who standeth upon the face of the earth in queues, watch carefully next time as the local newspaper photographer enters the bookshop. Yes, he’s looking for the legendary Typical Terry Pratchett fan! Watch him pace up and down, past the people in suits, the people who look like someone’s mum or dad, the people who look like they have a job and are on their lunch hour. What’s this? Three hundred people in the queue and not one of them with the decency to wear a pointy hat?
Or, as one puzzled security man said, after watching a queue that had amiably refrained from doing the expected but curiously weird things for three hours, “They’re all so … so normal!”
To which I replied, “Oh, no, they’re not that bad.…”
It’s been fun. It is fun. Long may it be fun.
Thank you.
KEVINS
The Author, Winter 1993
Back in the golden days when I was first writing, my wife, Lyn, used to bring me elevenses. And with the elevenses came a lot of manuscripts and a lot of letters.…
My wife christened them Kevins. It’s quite unfair. It was just that … well … one day the post included three letters all from boys called Kevin, and she wrote “Kevins” on the small folder and somehow the name stuck.
So now, once a week or whenever I’m feeling guilty, I write replies to the Kevins. Many of them are female. Some of them are grandmothers. I’ve never really counted them. All I know is that I write almost 200,000 words, about two novels’ worth, of letters every year. Most of them are letters to Kevins.
They never tell you about this in those How to Write books. Make some time to write every day … yes. Use one side of the paper only … yes. But do they tell you how to deal with almost thirty identical letters from Form 5A? No. Do they tell you how to reply to the man who accuses you of stealing his ideas by laser beam before he had time to write them down? Unaccountably not. Nor do they tell you that you might have to buy a guide to New Zealand to help identify badly written return addresses (you can make a reasonable stab at U.K. names like Newsquiggle-upon-Tyne, but almost anywhere in New Zealand that isn’t called Auckland or Wellington is called Rangiwangi … or at least looks as if it is).
I suppose all this comes under the heading of fan mail. As a genre author, I am probably perceived by my readers as “belonging” to them in a rather more direct way than, say, Martin Amis belongs to his readers—I effect, according to one reviewer, “a snug mindfit of opinion between reader and writer” (he meant it nastily—he was a Sunday Times man, after all).
So they don’t hesitate to ask for new titles featuring favourite characters. (“Dear Sir Arthur, Why not bring Sherlock Holmes back to track down Jack the Ripper …?”) Or for autographs. Or signed photographs. (This beats me. I mean who cares what an author looks like? You finish a book, perhaps the gripping narrative has left white-hot images snugly mindfitting into the brain—and then you turn to the back flap and there’s this short bald guy with a pipe.…)
Why do people write to authors? Field evidence here suggests that some are aspiring authors themselves and want the map reference of the Holy Grail. People really do ask us: How do you get published? with a strong implication that there must be more to it than, well, writing a decent book and sending it to publishers until one of them gives in. They want the Secret. I wish I knew what it was.
People really do ask: Where do you get your ideas from? And I’ve never come up with a satisfactory answer. “From a warehouse in Croydon” is only funny once. After that you have to think.
Sometimes they want to encourage us, as did the librarian who wrote: I think it’s marvellous that young readers enjoy your work, because that means we can get them into libraries and introduce them to real books.”
Or occasionally to chastise us. A teacher complained about the bad grammar of an eighty-year-old rural witch who’d never been to school (“Dear Mr. Dickens, You really must do something about the way Sam Weller talks …”). On the other hand, I had a most interesting correspondence with a French academic on the correct modern usage of the word careen, which went on for some time.
And the younger ones doing GCSE don’t hesitate to write on the lines of (to be read in one breath): “Dear Mr. Pratchett I have read all your books You are my favourite author I am doing a project on you Could you please answer these 400 questions by Friday because I have to hand it in on Monday.…”
I get around these by selecting the twenty most interesting questions and getting the computer to print out a Q&A sheet in really tiny print, which is updated every month or so. I suspect that many a narrow pass mark has been achieved by a bit of careful copying.…
It’s easy to tell a letter from a teenage reader. They tend to have numbered sentences, as in “Dear Mr. Pratchett, I would like to be a writer when I leave school. Can you tell me 1) Are you on flexitime? 2) What are your wages?” Every year, as regular as the arrival of the cuckoo, at least one of them writes asking if I could give them a week’s Work Experience, which I always think of in Hardyesque terms (“It were in 1993 that Master Pratchett took oi on as a prentice boy at one farthing a week—”).
Further down the age range, pencil and crayon creep in. These letters are quite short. They tend to get answered first. They are often accompanied by pictures. Anyone who has written anything for children knows what I mean. Sometimes they contain the toughest questions. And a list of all the household pets by name. At the other end of the scale the Kevins often begin, “I bet you don’t get many letters from seventy-five-year-old grandmothers …”
Actually, I do. Lots of adults who read me don’t always let on. It’s like those surveys you see in the literary papers at the end of the year—the celebs are asked what books they’ve enjoyed this year, and everyone knows they’ve been reading Joanna Trollope and Jilly Cooper and Tom Clancy, but they all go waxy faced and gabble the first five “serious” titles they can remember.
A statistically significant number of correspondents write to say they met someone else reading one of my books on a remote Greek island. It may of course always be the same person.