2 Comments

  1. armcie

    Getting on with the plot was definitely a choice Pratchett made when writing for children. Here he’s talking to the Independent about Maurice:

    I wonder what Pratchett sees as the difference between writing for children and writing for adults. He mentions the difficulty of not having a common frame of reference – will children understand an allusion to the Fab Four? However, “that’s almost just a technical issue”.

    Other than that, he doesn’t think the content is the important thing: “Writing for children is more a matter of tone and approach than language, how the story works rather than whether it’s got drug references.” He pauses, then expands: “It’s still allowed to be a children’s book, even if it’s got no drug references in it.”

    “One thing that I am aware of with Maurice: you say to the kids, ‘The rats are intelligent because they ate a lot of old magical rubbish that had been chucked over the wall of a magical university,’ and the kids say, ‘Fine, let’s get on with the story. We’re quite prepared to accept any amount of garbage like that if we then get on to a good story.’ The adults say, ‘Hang on a minute, how did this make them intelligent, as opposed to green?'”

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