I Think I Was Good Though I Could Have Been Better Terry Pratchett And His Life S Writing Autobiography And Memoirs

Wiltshire October 4, 2014 Dear Rob, So. I’ve been. There were days when I felt like I was already gone and so all I wish for now is a cool, quiet room and some quiet time to collect my additional thoughts. I think I was good, although I could be better, but Terry Pratchett is dead and there are no other words. Look after Lynn, please. Put these fine jewels in my design and bestow them with my love. Choose a gift every Christmas and birthday. Send flowers. Have a great dinner every year, more if necessary or if a feast is required, and put a brandy in my memory and on happy days. Take care of business and it will take care of you. For all you have done, for all the little things and for all the much bigger things and for burying the bodies… Thank you. I’m learning to fly. Do it now. And watch how you go. Try! Type of cloth To be clear: there were no real corpses that needed burial during my 20-plus years of working with Terry Pratchett. Terry could sometimes get mad at people and he certainly didn’t (as people often said of him) take fools gladly. But he never got so upset. Neil Gaiman collaborated with Terry Pratchett on the novel Good Omens. After Terry was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease, in 2007, at the cruelly young age of 59, I began accompanying him to public appearances, reading to him when he could no longer, helping him through stage interviews as his ‘guard anecdote”. We became, of necessity, a kind of double act. There were, inevitably, dark and trying times in those years, and I spent much of that period in denial of the full gravity of what was unfolding. Yet Terry did just the opposite, reacting to the news of his impending death with bravery, with indomitable forethought, with a determination to confront his condition publicly, with a bold mission to force the issue of assisted dying into the national conversation. , and mostly (being Terry) with work – three TV documentaries and seven other bestsellers. Terry often talked about “doing” his autobiography. In the years before he became ill, he talked about it almost exclusively to dismiss the idea. He didn’t seem convinced that there was anything in the story of the journey that took a boy from a townhouse in Beaconsfield to a knighthood and a mansion near Salisbury by the sheer force of his imagination alone. Or in the story of how a boy with, as Terry put it, “a mouthful of speech” became one of the most popular communicators of his generation. or how someone who left school with five O levels could also go on to hold an honorary professorship at Trinity College Dublin. And besides, there were always other things waiting to be written – longer stories in which much stranger and more exciting things were free to happen. But now that Terry’s memory itself was under express threat, the prospect of a memoir was different. Even in the car together from Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on that awful December afternoon when he was given the devastating diagnosis, Terry started talking about his autobiography – how he had to get on with it and how the clock was ticking. . His hat possessed a transforming magic – simply by wearing it, he would become his public persona However, we had no clear idea how long we had. One year? Two years? In fact, we had more time than we knew. it would be seven years before Terry’s last day on the job. However, when it came down to it, the novels were always the priority – first The Nation, the book Terry was working on at the time of his diagnosis, then Unseen Academicals, I Shall Wear Midnight, Snuff, Dodger, Raising Steam, The Shepherd’s Crown… Throughout this period he hunted to dispel these stories. However, there would be days when the mood was right, when Terry would tell me to open the memoir file and spend an afternoon on the autobiography, he would dictate, I would type. By the time we ran out of time, the file had grown to just over 24,000 words, rough, disjointed, waiting for the basic polish that Terry would never be able to give them. He intended to call the book A Life with Footnotes. And so there’s Terry Pratchett one evening in 2006, wearing a purple velvet dinner jacket with black silk lapels and sitting in a chauffeur-driven silver Mercedes as it passes under a lighted electric vault that reads: ‘TERRY’S HOGFATHER PRATCHETT”. Here is the former press officer of the Central Electricity Generating Board, South Western Region, with his name in lights – Terry Pratchett at the height of his powers. And here he is, as the car pulls up outside the Curzon cinema in Mayfair, dons his trademark black fedora and collects his purely decorative ebony cane with the silver Death’s Head handle, and exits the limousine in a blizzard of flashbulbs and a storm of shouting photographers and screaming fans jammed along the sidewalk. And here’s Terry Pratchett the next morning, back in his office, where the night before has no interest because it happened yesterday, and because the focus must always eventually return to a man in his gardening clothes, sitting at a screen , continuing with the next book. “Your reward for doing something good,” said Terry, “is to do something else good.” He left it a little late, of course, and he would think about it wistfully near the end when time was running out and we were losing him at 100mph. In a 2010 interview, Terry was asked what advice he would give his younger self. “Have as much sex as you can,” Terry immediately replied. But then he thought more seriously. “I wish I had started writing for a living sooner,” he finally said. “I probably could have started writing full-time about 10 years before I did.” What would those 10 extra years be, in Pratchett terms? Another 20 books? In 1987, having finally taken the plunge and left the CEGB for Gaze Cottage in Somerset and “the cold waters of self-employment”, he needed structure – the structure of an office day, only more rigorous. He kept to his room, with only the occasional cat for company. There was to be no interruption. Daily word goals became even more important to him, 3,000 the goal he now set himself. Terry seems to have decided that his approach to the job of being a novelist would be downright fancy – industrial, even. Furthermore, he would be adamant in prioritizing this industry over all other claims in his time. Rhianna, Terry and Lyn Pratchett dressed up for a stage adaptation of Maskerade in 1995. Photo: Penguin At the age of nine or 10, his daughter Rhianna drew a hat and wrote underneath: “I love my dad, but he’s too busy.” He’s been busy writing, but also busy building a following, at book signings, SF and fantasy conventions, game expos – developing his brand, so to speak. The hat helped. It had been bought, in early 1988, at Lock & Company in St James’s Street, in a rare moment of extravagance. Lock & Company’s 18th-century shop, with its dark green paint, was itself an enduring fascination for Terry, not to mention a location to eventually adapt for the Dodger book. This single element gave him, with almost absurd ease, an image. It possessed a transformative magic, in the sense that, simply by wearing it, he could become the public Terry Pratchett he was increasingly called upon to be. And of course, by the equally simple act of removing it, it could become itself again. It was, as he said, “anti-disguise”. It was a period of almost non-stop work, but it seemed very quickly and very pleasantly to pay off. One Sunday, with Terry on a rare day off, Lynn opened the newspaper to the bestseller list page and immediately went out into the garden to find him. “Terry, you’re number two!” he said. Terry let that sink in for a second, before typically putting a dent in the glory of his own moment. “Who’s number one?” he said. “Stephen King,” Lynn said. “Yeah,” said Terry, “and I bet he’s not in his back garden fixing a puncture on his daughter’s bike.” It all got too big, too fast. These were the years when Terry’s career caught fire and ignited properly and when all the critical numbers began to skyrocket. During the 1990s, Terry sold an average of 3 million books each year. No-one in Britain sold more and, as the newspaper profiles liked to put it, if you put every Terry Pratchett book you ever bought end-to-end, they’d reach… well, wherever you happen to be a long way from. Inevitably, Terry’s advances grew as well. They went from £51,000 a book to £200,000 a book and then £400,000 a book. And they would have continued to grow had they not encountered resistance from an unlikely source: Terry himself. After Gollancz’s six-book deal that had taken him away from the safe harbor of full-time work and ended with Witches Abroad in 1991, he decided he no longer wanted the pressures of such a long-term deal, the responsibility of which seemed in practice to more concerned than making him feel safe. He instructed his agent Colin Smyth to close deals for no more than two books at a time. Pratchett with his agent Colin Smythe (right) in 1971. Photo: Penguin Terry also had strong and, some might say, puritanical ideas about how much money he should accept before publishing a book. If he couldn’t be sure that the advance would be earned within three years…