And I wish I could tell you how many other incidents like this there are. In The Wee Free Men, the village has a tradition of burying a shepherd with a piece of wool on his shroud, so that the recording angel will excuse him all those times during lambing when he failed to attend church—because a good shepherd should know that the sheep come first. I didn’t make that up. They used to do that in a village two miles from where I live. What I particularly liked about it was the implicit loyalist arrangement with God. Americans, I think, sometimes get puzzled by people in Ireland who call themselves loyalists yet would apparently up arms against the forces of the crown. But a loyalist arrangement is a dynamic accord. It doesn’t mean we will be blindly loyal to you. It means we will be loyal to you if you are loyal to us. If you act the way we think a king should act, you can be our king. And it seemed to me that these humble people of the village, putting their little piece of wool on the shroud, were saying, “If you are the God we think you are, you will understand. And if you are not the God we think you are, to Hell with you.” So much of Discworld has come from odd serendipitous discoveries like that.
I read and read and read throughout my teens. I was a child born just before the TV generation so it never really caught me. I haunted all the bookshops. I read every book I could find. I picked up stuff like a Hoover, and remembered it out of the sheer joy of finding out that the universe is stuffed with interest. Knowledge kind of drifted down out of the atmosphere.
The first book I ever bought for myself was Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. There are some milestones in my career, and one I am possibly most proud of is that I was asked to write an introduction for the book’s Millennium edition. I’ve got just about all possible editions of it. A great, great help to a fantasy writer. When I needed to find out exactly how you build a clock of flowers in order to tell the time by the opening and closing of the blooms, I turned first to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and there it was. So that’s where I get my ideas from. I look them up in books. How do you write the stories? You make it up as you go along. This is a terrible thing to have to tell people. But I’ve spoken to other authors and when there is no one else nearby, that’s what we agree that we do. We just have different definitions of make up, go, and along. And possibly of it, too.
Currently, I’m writing the next adult Discworld book. What I have is a title. I know that in this story there is a children’s book, and the children’s book is called Where’s My Cow? and Commander Vimes is reading to young Sam Vimes, who is just over a year old. And young Sam Vimes must be read to at six o’clock every night. No matter what the Commander of Police is doing, no matter how serious the political murder he’s investigating, he will go home to read to his little boy out of Where’s My Cow? It is important to both of them.
Where’s My Cow? has a very small vocabulary. It has been chewed all around the edges. And the narrative runs: “Where’s my cow? Is that my cow? It goes baa! It is a sheep. That’s not my cow!”… and so on, through various barnyard creatures; parents here will know what I mean. Vimes reads this every night and thinks, “This kid lives in a city. A big, big city. The only sound that animals make in the city is sizzle.” And he looks around and the nursery has got sheep on the wallpaper, and bunny rabbits and foxes and giraffes with waistcoats. Why? And he thinks, “What would the urban children’s storybook be like, with all the seamstresses and the beggars and things like that? What kind of noise does a beggar make? ‘Blaugh! For some money I won’t follow you home!’ ”
And I know, I know, that in this book, which is barely under construction, there’s going to be a moment where Vimes is reading through it for the umpteenth time—and this book is soggy, his son goes to sleep chewing this book—and he is going to look at it, and in the back of his mind is this terribly complex crime, and somehow that little book is going to become pivotal to the solution. I don’t even know what the crime is yet!*1
I spoke to Neil Gaiman about this the other day, and he said exactly the same thing. You have this little oasis of exactly the right piece of plot, and you know it’s going to work, and you have no idea yet what the connective tissue is. The book’s called Thud! because it is based on a game called Thud which is actually available in the U.K. It’s a game between trolls and dwarfs. It’s specifically designed to be played by trolls and dwarfs. Maybe that’s why we’re not selling many to humans! But also, in a kind of nod towards Dashiell Hammett, it’s a good way of starting a murder mystery. “Thud! That’s the sound he made when he hit the ground.” From there, you can go anywhere.
Unfortunately for me, at the same time as this I am also writing the next book in the Wee Free Men series.
Writing two books at the same time—which is incredibly bad for your health, I’m on six pills a day already, which has given me the water-retaining capabilities of a drainpipe—writing two books at the same time is actually quite nifty because you can take a rest from writing one, to write the other. Now you know how I got where I am today. And again, I’m writing scenes which are good, and I don’t know where they are going to fit in the book.
But it’s what I call “The Valley Filled with Clouds” technique. You’re at the edge of the valley, and there is a church steeple, and there is a tree, and there is a rocky outcrop, but the rest of it is mist. But you know that because they exist, there must be ways of getting from one to the other that you cannot see. And so you start the journey. And when I write, I write a draft entirely for myself, just to walk the valley and find out what the book is going to be all about.
I’m sure true writers do not work like this. I know for a fact that Larry Niven uses lots of little postcards, and writes the outline of each scene on one. I know this, because once upon a time we discussed doing a beanstalk story together. Both of us wanted to do it, and after some discussion, we agreed two things. One was that any of the ideas we came up with in that discussion, either of us could use, because they were only ideas after all. And the other was that there was no way on God’s good earth that the two of us could ever collaborate on anything, because the styles of working simply would not interlock.