this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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There are regular books that don't have any chapters. Most of Terry Pratchett's Discworld Books are an example of this.
That threw me when I started Guards! Guards!. I generally only have time to read at night and stop at the first chapter break after 11:00. For several nights in a row I was reading until midnight, giving up, then forgetting by the next time. Eventually I checked ahead and realized there weren't any, but a lot of his 'sections' are chapter sized, so it works out.
Really? I've read almost all of them twice and I wouldn't have been able to tell you that lol
Terry does include breaks and beats in the stories that many other authors would adorn as a new chapter, but he never does. honestly imo that makes things almost filmic - for example where a switch in perspective usually prompts a new chapter and pushes an author to make it longer, Terry can just write a single page or even a few paragraphs to tease you a bit of what's going on elsewhere in the story, and then go back to the usual perspective but now with the added context & tension
His early books literally started with a visual description of the reader's imagination "camera" gradually focusing on Great A'Tuin, the Disc, whatever region the action was going to happen in, and so on.
Filmic is exactly what he was going for.
There are divisions in the text that other authors might have broken into chapters. He is actually incredibly clever with those divisions, building sections longer or shorter to control the speed of the story.