It can’t be stressed, enough: Terry Pratchett was ahead of his time. In Equal Rites (the third novel in the Discworld series), Terry Pratchett uses his wit, humor, and grand storytelling to poke just about every hole imaginable in the worldviews of old, crotchety men obsessed with the asinine idea that women can’t hold the same positions as them due to some fundamental difference or inferiority. What’s more, Pratchett doesn’t just set up a straw-man and knock it down: his characters show the myriad forms that sexism can take—including layered sexism from other women— and they often argue their points well, which allows him to expose the laughably weak arguments at the core of these sexist mindsets.
While Equal Rites can occasionally feel a little “on-the-nose,” the humor keeps that from being a turn-off, the light-hearted mood allows readers to feel that they aren’t being preached at, and Pratchett’s characters and world are both believable and interesting enough to convince readers that these conversations would go down the way they do, no matter how philosophically-overt. In fact, that’s a stand-out quality in this book. Equal Rites, more than the first two Discworld novels, starts to show Pratchett’s talent for creating characters that are well-rounded, believable, interesting, and relatable. While his character-writing had improved in the previous novel (and certainly wasn’t bad), Equal Rites dials that characterization up a few notches and brings the third-person narration close enough to feel more high-stakes, real emotion.
But, I’d like to point the eye of aspiring writers to something a little more narrow: his wordplay. Specifically, I’d like to discuss why Pratchett’s absurd metaphors, similes, and analogies—no matter how crazy—always seem to dial in on the exact idea he’s looking for.
It’s no secret that writers go friggin’ bonkers for wordplay. I’d imagine it’s part of the reason we love working with prose: it gives us opportunities to find some new twist of the tongue or novel play on words, putting the beauty and flexibility of human language on full display. Still, all of us have heard analogies that felt hokey or forced, and it’s astonishing how often you’ll find figures of speech that, while beautiful and creative, are more “pretty” than they are accurate or helpful to the reader.
Pratchett, on the other hand, seems to constantly hit the nail right on the god-damn head. For example, he describes an orangutan as “a small pot-bellied man with extremely long arms and a size 12 skin on a size 8 body.” Hilarious and creative, but so accurate that you know exactly what he’s talking about even as you start giggling.
He does it for non-physical things, too, giving insight into his world. When talking about the nowhere town the main character came from, he describes it as “one of those places that exist merely so people can have come from them.” And, as one character taps into the personality of the massive building whose mind she’s “borrowing,” and whose occupants have never treated it as anything other than a piece of property to be abused, Pratchett somehow manages to give his readers a glimpse into the mindset of a building: “Granny could sense it like a big and quite friendly animal, just waiting to roll over on its roof and have its floor scratched.”
Crazy as these analogies are, readers know exactly what Pratchett’s talking about when he uses them. I think part of the reason for that is that Pratchett isn’t afraid to get a little bit weird. He’s not interested in pretentiousness or coming up with some pretty turn-of-phrase that a bunch of goateed college freshman will deconstruct in a classroom overflowing with a murky combination of ego and cotton-candy philosophizing. Instead, he’s interested in accuracy and laughs, and that second part allows him to tap into the absurdity of our world in order to better hit the first.
After all, the world’s a lot more weird than it is solemn. But, I suppose that’s me philosophizing, isn’t it?
A more practical way to shift this article would be to explain why Pratchett’s figures of speech are so accurate. Really, it comes down to the fact that Pratchett isn’t trying to capture the image of something as much as he is the emotion and feeling of the thing. Even the “size 12 skin on a size 8 body” line, while highly visual, also catches the sort of silly feeling you get watching orangutans in their awkward bodies. By focusing on emotion as much as sensory representation, Pratchett jumps right past the middleman and comes up with an analogy that gets his readers emotionally involved.
But, why does that work so well? And why don’t more simple visual analogies accomplish the same task? Oddly enough, we can turn right to a line from Equal Rites, for that:
[Esk] gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers of paper until they were fossilized… And the words people said were just shadows of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.
Equal Rites, Page 147
Alright, so Esk isn’t actually talking about emotions here (she’s talking about the magic words written in some of the books she’s seen), but the point still stands. When we write, we write to engage with hearts and minds— to make people think, or to make them feel— but our writing is three times removed from the intended thought or emotion. We can’t transmit thoughts or emotions, so we have to distill them into language (notoriously clumsy), then put that language onto the page (incomplete). Now, the reader has to pass through a hefty set of hurdles to get them to the thoughts and emotions we want.
But, by trying to connect his readers with an amorphous feeling (the sense of a lonely building as a dog waiting to be scratched, or a town that is only remembered because important people come from it) Pratchett uses the limitations of language leapfrog us over a few of these hurdles, in the hopes that we jump high enough to glimpse the feeling he wants. It doesn’t hurt that, sometimes, these analogies are little stories in and of themselves (and stories carry emotion), or that he shoots for relatable rather than wholly novel.
Either way, Pratchett manages to get what he’s going for, and we, as readers, are better for it. For the writers out there, think about that with your wordplay. Instead oftrying to make your readers see or hear what you want them to see or hear, make them feel what you want them to feel.
Give it a go, and happy writing!
Featured Image courtesy of Mira Cosic!
