Once More With Footnotes

reporter, I had to interview a famous footballer (fam ous, at least, in our small town — and by football I of course mean proper English football). The sports editor had given me a list of important questions to ask, all about technique and approach.
     
                  I asked them. The footballer, a man of skilled feet but lim ited education, did his best for a while to answer them and then said, "Look, it's like this. I get the ball, and I does me best to get it into the goal. I can't tell you how I do it. You clever buggers should be the ones tellin' me how I do it. I just do it."
     
                  Later on, I worked out what he meant. He meant you shouldn't ask the sculptor how he works out which bits of stone aren't statue. You shouldn't ask the man on the tightrope how he keeps his balance. You can ask the writer why he or she writes. But I 'm not sure the answer will be any more coherent, although it will contain far more words, and I'll keep mine short.
     
                  All I know is that I've always written the Discworld books for fun, and was lucky enough to come up with a world that is flexible enough to more or less accommodate anything I want to write; I started off by parodying post-Tolkien fantasy and have more or less ended up parodying real life. I don't ever remember sitting down and planning the whole thing. It always seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm having a lot of fun and people keep giving me money. I'm not supposed to say no, am I?
     

I met folklorist Jacqueline Simson on a signing tour. I didn't know she was a folklorist, but I was asking random people in the queue to quote any magpie rhyme they knew, and she turned out to know lots. (This was a bit of popular research for Carpe Jugulum.) Magpie rhymes, for those who don't know, are simple divinatory rhymes that are, or at least used to be, used by kids. Fortune telling by birds, in fa ct, without having to look at their entrails. You just had to count the birds, and the entrails went without saying. Typically the rhymes would run, "One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a funeral, four for a birth ..." and presumably all the way up t o , "1,347for the phone number of the avian pest controller."
     
    That meeting led to a friendship that might yet end up with a book on the genuine folklore basis of much of Discworld, but, on the way, led to me, in 1999, giving the 18 th Katherine Briggs Memori al Lecture to the British Folklore Society.
     
     
     
     
     
I maginary W orlds, R eal S tories
     
                  I am not a folklorist, but I am a vast consumer of folklore — an end user, if you like. I think about folklore in the same way that a carpenter thinks about trees, although a good carpenter works with the grain of the wood and should endeavour to make a table that will leave the tree glad that it became timber.
     
                  I am an author. I am, by the crude yardstick of sales, an immensely successful one. I'm quite happy with that yard stick. The author's prime task is to be read. The book in question may have many fine qualities, but if it cannot persuade the reader to read past page one they are going to go unnoticed. The story cannot exist in one mind alone. It has to be told.
     
                  In fa ct, it is truer to say that I am a journalist, by inclination and training. A proper journalist, I may add, who was taught by men who knew their craft and can still recall his shorthand when the need arises. This is in contrast to the other sort, who go s t raight from university into a column on an upmarket daily, one of those with a little picture of them at the top, where they can primp and posture in their little play street without being knocked down by real life. It sounds like the Victorian era when I talk about it now, but I was an indentured apprentice and I was in there at the death of hot metal and I still think that a Linotype machine is a more amazing creation than a computer.
     
                  I know a number of authors who trained as journalists first. It can m ess up your style, we've agreed, but it does give you a tendency to turn in things on time, check your spelling, and remember above all that writing is a collaborative process to which the reader also brings something.
     
                  It is particularly good training fo r a genre author.
     
                  It's quite hard