The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

This was the introduction to Terry Pratchett’s non-fiction collection, A Slip of the Keyboard, 2014.

Life is a stream: an ongoing conversation of nature with itself, contradictory and opinionated and dangerous. And the stream is made up of births and deaths, of things that come into existence and pass away. But there is always life, and things feeding on life.

It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that.

I do not care – I do not believe it matters – whether these books are paper or digital, whether you are reading on a scroll or scrolling on a screen. The content is the important thing.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.

There are too many books out there. So you want to make it easier on the people shelving them and on the people looking for them by limiting the places they’re going to go looking for books. You give them places not to look. That’s the simplicity of book shelving in bookstores. It tells you what not to read.

‘I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things.

The miracle of prose is this: it begins with the words. What we, as authors, give to the reader isn’t the story. We don’t give them the people or the places or the emotions. What we give the reader is a raw code, a rough pattern, loose architectural plans that they use to build the book themselves. No two readers can or will ever read the same book