Terry Pratchett - Writing - Style and Major Themes

Style and Major Themes

Pratchett is known for a distinctive writing style that includes a number of characteristic hallmarks. One example is his use of footnotes, which usually involve a comic departure from the narrative or a commentary on the narrative, and occasionally have footnotes of their own.

Pratchett has a tendency to avoid using chapters, arguing in a Book Sense interview that "life does not happen in regular chapters, nor do movies, and Homer did not write in chapters", adding "I'm blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults." However, there have been exceptions; Going Postal and Making Money and several of his books for younger readers are divided into chapters. Pratchett has offered explanations for his sporadic use of chapters; in the young adult titles, he says that he must use chapters because ' editor screams until does', but otherwise feels that they're an unnecessary 'stopping point' that gets in the way of the narrative.

Characters, place names, and titles in Pratchett's books often contain puns, allusions and culture references. Some characters are parodies of well-known characters: for example, Pratchett's character Cohen the Barbarian, also called Ghengiz Cohen, is a parody of Conan the Barbarian and Genghis Khan, and his character Leonard of Quirm is a parody of Leonardo da Vinci. Another parody is in the Discworld Companion, where the article for Unseen University has a Latin motto that when translated reads, "Now you see it, now you don't,".

Another hallmark of his writing is the use of capitalised dialogue without quotation marks, used to indicate the character of Death communicating telepathically into a character's mind. Other characters or types of characters have similarly distinctive ways of speaking, such as the auditors of reality never having quotation marks, Ankh-Morpork grocers never using punctuation correctly, and golems capitalising each word in everything they say. Pratchett also made up a new colour, octarine, a 'fluorescent greenish-yellow-purple', which is the eighth colour in the Discworld spectrum—the colour of magic. Indeed, the number eight itself is regarded in the Discworld as being a magical number; for example, the eighth son of an eighth son will be a wizard, and his eighth son will be a "sourcerer" (which is one reason why wizards aren't allowed to have children).

Discworld novels often include a modern innovation and its introduction to the world's medieval setting, such as a public police force (Guards! Guards!), guns (Men at Arms), submarines (Jingo), cinema (Moving Pictures), investigative journalism (The Truth), the postage stamp (Going Postal), and modern banking (Making Money). The "clacks", the tower-to-tower semaphore system system that has sprung up in later novels, is a mechanical version of the telegraph chain, with all the change and turmoil that such an advancement implies. The resulting social upheaval driven by these changes serves as the setting for the main story.