A Slip of the Keyboard (11 page)

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.

Many of them have this in common, though: they express doubts that the author will read the letter, let alone answer it. The letter is an act of faith. It’s as though they’ve put a message in a bottle and tossed it into the sea. But …

… well, when I was young, I wrote a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien, just as he was becoming extravagantly famous. I think the book that impressed me was
Smith of Wootton Major
. Mine must have been among hundreds or thousands of letters he received every week. I got a reply. It might have been dictated. For all I know, it might have been typed to a format. But it was
signed
.

He must have had a sackful of letters from every commune and university in the world, written by people whose children are now grown-up and trying to make a normal life while being named Galadriel or Moonchild. It wasn’t as if I’d said a lot. There were no numbered questions. I just said I’d enjoyed the book very much. And he said thank you.

For a moment, it achieved the most basic and treasured of human communications: you are real, and therefore so am I.

After thinking about that, I’ve tried to persuade myself that the mail isn’t a distraction from writing but some kind of necessary echo of it. It’s part of the whole process. A kind of after-sales service.
There is, admittedly, the terminally weird letter, although these are rare. And sometimes the handwriting defeats us. And readers who want to continue a lengthy correspondence sometimes have to be gently let down, because of God’s lack of foresight in putting only twenty-four hours in one day. But apart from those rarities, they all get answered sooner or later … I hope. It’s part of the whole thing, if ever I manage to work out what the whole thing is.

The Author
,
Autumn 1999

“Hey U R 1 kewl dood, can U give Me some Tips about Writing?” You may be familiar with e-mails like this, if you’re known to be an author with an Internet address. On the Internet, no one cares how you spell. Dyslexia is imitated, not as an affliction but as a badge of coolth. Some of the younger users regard as suspicious any suggestion that vaguely competent English has a part to play. I suggested to one correspondent that, if he wished to be a writer, he should allow grammar, spelling, and punctuation to enter his life; he bridled, on the basis that “publishers have people to do that’!

Ahem …

My e-mail address is public, and easily tracked down. I am a popular author. I no longer count the e-mails I get every day. I answer as many as I can.

Fairly early on, I learned that a filter on my mailbox was essential
to electronic survival; that decision was made, in fact, in the days when I still used a 2,400 baud modem and someone decided to e-mail me their illustrated manuscript—all three megabytes of it (the ethos of the Internet was evolved by people who did not have to pay their own phone bills). Besides, a filter also helps cut out all that spam addressed to “friend.” No stranger who is up to any good calls you “friend.”

That was just irksome. Now I’ve hit what I think is a real problem.

One of the traditions of the fantasy and science fiction genre is communication; fans like to be in touch with lots of other fans and they embraced the Internet with amazing speed as an alternative to the mimeograph machine or computer printer. And another tradition has been “fan fiction.”

Plenty of other genres have their fans, but “fanfic” is unique to F&SF, as far as I know. People, out of the love of doing it, write further stories set in some professional author’s universe and using established characters and background, and publish them on an amateur basis for the pleasure of their friends.

Traditionally, since in many cases they themselves were once fans (it’s hard to imagine becoming a science fiction writer without having a liking for science fiction) the genre authors have turned a benign or blind eye to this legally dubious activity. Be happy that you have fans has been the consensus, and if you have fans they will be … fannish. It’s not a bad training ground for writers. It’s just part of the whole thing.

Authors who write a popular series find that readers are not passive receivers: they take the view that the author writes the script but the movie is played out in the reader’s own head, and therefore the enterprise is in some ways a collaboration or interactive one in which the reader has rights, if only the right to an opinion. This sort of thing has gone on for years in a private kind of way (“Dear Miss Austen, I think it would be really cool if one of your heroines were to
fall in love with Napoleon …”). It’s probably healthy. The trouble is that the Net is not private and it magnifies everything, good and bad.

I used to read the two newsgroups devoted to me and my work. It is fun to see one’s books publicly deconstructed by an Oxford don on the same newsgroup as they are deconstructed by someone who thinks
Star Wars
is a really old movie. But I recently stopped reading them, after seven years.

I started to get nervous when people began posting, on the public newsgroups, plot suggestions for future books and speculation about how characters would develop. The Net is still new, and it is big and it is public, and has brought with it new perceptions and problems. (One minor one is that people are out driving their language on a worldwide highway without passing a test. Take the word
plagiarize
. I know what it means. You know what it means. Lawyers certainly know what it means. But I have seen it repeatedly used as a synonym for
research, parody
, and
reference
, as in “
Wyrd Sisters
was plagiarized from Shakespeare.” That was a book of mine and, yes, well, it certainly does add to the enjoyment if you’ve heard of a certain Scottish play and … er … where do I start?)

Now add to this the growth of strange ideas about copyright. At one end of the spectrum I get nervous letters asking “Will it be all right if I name my cat after one of your characters?” At the other are the e-mails like: “I enjoyed the story so much that I’ve scanned it in and put it on my Web page … hope you don’t mind.” Copyright is either thought to exist in every single word, or not at all.

In short, I began to worry, in this overheated atmosphere, about what would happen if I used a story line that a fan had already posted on the Net or on some fan-fiction Web page.

I’ve already had a few e-mails on the lines of “I see you have used that idea of mine, then,” when the idea in question was “Why doesn’t Terry Pratchett write a book about Australia/pirates/football?” (I once had one—and I’m sure I’ve not been the first—which
quite frankly said, “I’ve got a great idea that will make us both a lot of money if you write the book, but obviously I can’t tell you about it until we’ve signed a contract.…”)

We all soon become aware that to many otherwise intelligent people “the Idea” is the heart, soul, and centre of a novel, and all that stuff about plot, point, character, dialogue, and 100,000 written words is a clerical detail. Get the Idea, and all you need then is someone to “write it down.”

I may be worrying too much, but there is something to worry about. It isn’t the law that worries me. Come to that, it isn’t 99.99 percent of fans on the Net. It’s simply that in every crowd there’s a twerp. All any twerp needs to do is protest loud and long, and he or she will get attention from other twerps who’ll go along for the ride—after all, if such people didn’t exist, the
Ricki Lake Show
wouldn’t have an audience. And then you just need a journalist who thinks it’d make a good story on the lines of “Famous Author Stole My Idea, Says Disappointed Fan,” and if you don’t think a journalist would run something like this, you haven’t been reading the papers. Even the participation of a journalist isn’t necessary. The Net itself is, as a publicity device, available to all.

Unfortunately, very little imagination is needed for this scenario. There have already been hints of it in the United States where, as we know, people sue as automatically as they breathe, and there’s soon to be a class action against God for making an imperfect world. It has certainly been enough, rumour says, to cause other authors to shun “their” newsgroups.

It’s a shame, but I think I’ve very publicly got to log off, too. I’ve got lots of ideas. Now, if only people would let me have some Time.

Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, 2007