The Beautiful But Evil Space Princess recently gave me a bagful of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books- I initially typed that as ‘discoworld’, which would’ve been an interesting twist- and I’ve been working my way through them.
Lots of ink and pixels have been spilled discussing Pratchett’s style- some by me, if memory serves, but it was long enough ago that I can revisit the subject. Most of that discussion is from a reader’s perspective. His works are funny, satirical, surprisingly deep, and a bunch of other adjectives that make for good quotes on a dust jacket.
And I’ll say right off the bat: it took me a while to get into his style as a reader; it was too self-aware for my liking, and felt kind of smarmy at first, like the book was going to lead me down a path then yank the rug out from under me- or worse, all the threads would stay disconnected and pointless. The abrupt and seemingly unconnected changes of setting and point of view didn’t help. I had to go through a few of his books to make sure I wasn’t being taken for a ride.
(I’m also one of those people who detests Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, because it feels pointless and rug-pully to me; I initially thought Pratchett was more of the same. I never claimed to have the most refined palate when it comes to literature (or food, but that’s another post)).
Not as much ink has been spilled discussing his style from a writer’s perspective, so, here we are.
It’s a very easy style to write, in some respects, because it’s self-aware. You can, just, tell the reader important information, and as long as it’s not contradicted by what you’re showing them, it works. You don’t have to dress it up and be all flowery, and the presence of an omniscient narrator means you don’t have to pay as much attention to whether the POV character would actually know the information you’re trying to impart to the audience.
But the sheer wackiness of it requires a certain mindset. The writer has to be willing and able to pick out the weird bits of a setting or circumstance, and put them on the page- or occasionally, to think in a straight line then swerve suddenly into weirdness, for comic or dramatic effect. I’ve found that a certain amount of weirdness can be added in during editing passes, though I have no idea whether Pratchett wrote that way or not. Placeholder names and the addition of brackets and in-text notes [that give the writer or editor hints for later] are a boon to writers of many stripes.
Not all of his books are layers of wackiness hiding a serious subject. The Tiffany Aching books take themselves a little more seriously from the get-go; I think that’s because they’re YA, and the intended audience is sensitive to anything that looks like making fun of them. They’re also less well read, so there’s less room for some of the references and jokes that make his other books fun and wacky. More of a standard YA fantasy- the better kind. But they retain that sense of seeing reality for what it is (important for witches (and everybody else)), not only what we wish reality could be. All of that makes for a different style of writing, that can be easier to imitate, because your imagination doesn’t have to be quite as sideways as it does for the wackier style; or harder to imitate, because you can’t use wackiness to paper over the cracks.
Your mileage may vary, of course, and I’m not saying anyone has to go out and imitate Pratchett’s unusual style. Some of his techniques can look odd and out of place if you sprinkle them randomly into your writing; you have to plan your sprinkles of wackiness carefully, or go the whole hog and jump right in. Fortunately, written wackiness is easier to clean up than craft glitter.
Your turn- do you like the Discworld books? Have you ever tried to imitate that style of writing? How did it go? Are there any other authors who, in your opinion, have a distinctive style worthy of emulation?
And, go!
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “On the Disc”
I like the Witches books, and a few others. Other sub-series just don’t click, and I’m not sure why. I’ve never sat down and considered what keeps me from enjoying them as much.
I don’t have the gift of sustained satire. Short stories, sort of, but not a longer story.
I like them all, love some of them . . . and realize that I am completely incapable of writing like that.
The earliest books are clunky. If I’d started there, I might not have continued. But the weirdness of Men At Arms drew me in. Hogfather leaves me in awe.
Nightwatch and Thud! are at the very top of my list of “novels that I would take with me onto a deserted island and I could only take a few.” They’re riotously funny–but I think they’re also some of Pratchett’s darkest books as well, since he’s dealing with some deeply un-funny themes (and does it very very well). Hogfather is also on that list, but if I could only pick two out of three, it would be the first two, and if could pick only one…it would be a tough choice, tbh, but I think I’d go with Nightwatch. That was the book that turned me from a “Yeah, he’s funny, and the books are fun, but not my favorite” to “he is absolutely in my top five favorite authors”
British humor. An acquired taste. But once you acquire it, you relish it. Jolie LaChance KG7IQC
Maybe I am just humor impaired but I find authors trying be continuously funny at book length kind of wearing. (I have a lot of respect for the craftsmanship that went into Friday’s Child and the joy it has brought people, but there’s a reason it’s close to the very bottom of my Heyer reread rotation). A combination of that and the fan base rubbing me the wrong way in the early days of the internet led to me avoiding Discworld out of sheer cussedness except for the bits one picks by osmosis.
From the age of, oh, maybe 11, I bought every book in the paperback revolution in the SFF genres that stood still long enough for me to wrestle it to the cashier. So I read the Discworld stuff rather too young and bounced off them as “too irritatingly precious and full of themselves”. But by the time I started noticing that Pratchett kept being universally praised (late teens), I conscientiously dove in again to see if my mind would change.
The difference was that I had acquired in the meantime a much more informed and dark sense of irony, satire, hyperbole, etc., and they hit me just right… not too cutesy, not too precious. I don’t like everything Pratchett wrote/writes, but I am now a great defender of the Discworld “world”. I can’t write in this style (and wouldn’t want to), but expertise in any area never needs to be defended, just explored, and Pratchett clearly qualified.
The lesson I would derive is that satire is not a primary vision, but a reactive one. If you’re going to satirize something, your reader needs to be familiar with the “straight” version of that thing already to appreciate the commentary. That rules out the “too young to get the references” crowd.
A good comparison from a much earlier generation is James Branch Cabell. “Jurgen” (1919) is the work people remember, the start of his series (The Biography of the Life of Manuel). It’s all satire, all the time, with the added spice of running afoul of the real world New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Not only were the books notorious as well as uproarious, they were also published in collector editions illustrated by Frank C Pape, which made them valuable on the book market.
If you’ve never heard of him, look him up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurgen:_A_Comedy_of_Justice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Branch_Cabell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_C._Pap%C3%A9
I know I’m a complete philistine, but I haven’t read him. Sure, I’ve sampled the start of several, but they never drew me in even though I like plenty of other British writers. I do plan to try him again one of these years.
Hitchhiker’s Guide laughed at the reader for liking stuff.
Terry Pratchett’s stuff lets out a delighted laugh and spins around in mad glee to find all the various variations that are around to be liked.
never finished Hitchhiker’s Guide either…
tried reading him before and bounced off, hard. maybe i should try again.
Generally, the trick is to find someone who has read them all, and tell them what you’re in the mood to read.
Well, there is his theory of afterlife, where you go where you think you deserve, and so you only go to Hell if you really think you deserve it — so it’s important to shoot all missionaries on sight! (Har har har.)
Then Vorbis appears. Does Vorbis get, at his death, wafted off to Heaven by flights of angels to a golden throne and a high position, as he thinks he deserves? Why, no.
(One also notes that the pagan visions of the afterlife were quite dreary actually.)
I have not actually read him yet. However, I did accidentally pick up the Wheel of Time books thinking they were Diskworld, and being very surprised by the difference in time from what I was expecting…
Wheel of Time is good, but some of the villians were a bit too real for me and I ended up putting it down