Stop it already!
Paragraph breaks are your friend.
White space is gentle on the eye.
Embrace it!
Forget what you were told in school: A paragraph does not consist of one point or one idea. That bogus notion leads to paragraphs that go on for pages and pages and pages as the writer explicates everything they can which supports the one point they are making.
Gah!
In beginner fiction, you see paragraphs that contain every thought that particular character is having about the situation they are in. Or action scenes where everything the character does is in one paragraph. And the next paragraph is everything some other character is doing. This makes for long long paragraphs and an unpleasant reading experience where your eye keeps skipping ahead desperate for some glimmer of hope, ie some white space.
Double gah!
Paragraphs can be any length you want them to be. There is no hard and fast rule on their length. One-sentence paragraphs are fine; whole-page paragraphs can be too. Anyone who tells you to avoid either one is smoking crack. Like everything else—ornate word choice, omniscient point-of-view, adverbs—it’s all about how you use them, not about whether they’re evil. (The only thing that is evil and wrong and should never be written about is unicorns.)
The trick is to vary your paragraph lengths and make them serve the story or argument you are making. If you want to emphasise a point. Go the one-sentence.
It can help drive your point home.
If you’re writing an action scene throwing in a one-sentence paragraph can be like a gun shot:
The blue sparks glowed through the trees again, revealing the silhouette of a great cat raised up on his haunches. The creature was young and eager for a kill, full of the fervor of Samhain. Then Rex spotted a human form just past the darkling: Melissa tossing up handfuls of metal, hurling the bolts and screws that Dess had created into the cat’s face, driving it wild with fury. It let out a cry, swiping a claw at the tiny missiles.
Then it dropped into a crouch, ready to launch itself at her.
Obviously I don’t mean a gunshot as in:
The car exploded!
It’s more gunshot as in your eye gives it more weight. The way your ear gives more weight to the sound of a real gunshot.
So the example above is longer paragraph that is all, la, la, la, something is happening, building up, building up, building up. Ominous, nervous-making, scary, scary scary. It’s non goodness is becoming more and more obvious and thus more and more erky perky and scary scary scary.
And then—short paragraph!—things get even worse.
Long paragraphs can be useful too. Your eye tells you that all the stuff in one belongs together. It’s all happening at the same time. All stems from the one train of thought. Long paragraphs can slow things down when you need them to. They can replicate a state of revery:
She’d seen that happen sometimes with dance floors, especially old ones that had been danced on by thousands and thousands of people over the years. The dance floor absorbed all that crowd magic, began to dance a little itself. Once, in a shoe store in the city, Jay-Tee had taken one step on the old wooden floor and felt it reaching toward her, accommodating itself to the movement of her feet, ready, eager for her to dance. Instantly she’d known it had been a dance floor—people had waltzed, fox-trotted, Charlestoned, jitterbugged, boogied, and twisted across its surface for many, many years. She’d spun, feeling the floor push back, giving her extra spring and lift. She’d grinned. One of the guys who worked there had grinned back, danced toward her. “Isn’t this song great? Just makes you dance.”
I could have broken it up like this:
She’d seen that happen sometimes with dance floors, especially old ones that had been danced on by thousands and thousands of people over the years. The dance floor absorbed all that crowd magic, began to dance a little itself.
Once, in a shoe store in the city, Jay-Tee had taken one step on the old wooden floor and felt it reaching toward her, accommodating itself to the movement of her feet, ready, eager for her to dance. Instantly she’d known it had been a dance floor—people had waltzed, fox-trotted, Charlestoned, jitterbugged, boogied, and twisted across its surface for many, many years.
She’d spun, feeling the floor push back, giving her extra spring and lift. She’d grinned.
One of the guys who worked there had grinned back, danced toward her. “Isn’t this song great? Just makes you dance.”
I felt the second version loses its rhythm and become too staccato-y, which works counter to the fairy-tale, reminscing feel I was going for. Another writer might have made a different choice. It’s not about right or wrong; it’s about what works for you.
I know blog entries are not (usually) professionally written and edited prose, but surely those writing them don’t want potential readers to land on the site, see nothing but one solid block of text stretching as far as they can be bothered to scroll, and retreat screaming to the nearest friendly-to-white-space blog?
I love a good insane screed, so it’s a crushing disappointment to me when I can’t read ’em because they’re so horribly punctuated. Thousand-kilometre-long paragraphs make a person seem even loopier than their rant does.
See how much white space there is in this rant? You’re not thinking I’m crazy at all, are you?
Don’t answer that . . .
excellent post.
*doesn’t tell Justine about the unicorn*
Oh good gravy, as a recent online screed linkee, I hope you’re not talking about me…
:: scurries away ashamed ::
Paragraph breaks are really useful when reading aloud, too — they give the reader an idea how much “space” each sentence should take up.
Now if only people respected capital letters….
(pre-emptive submissive apology to the blog overlord!)
I have the same reaction: ‘Too… many… words!’. For some reason, I find it even worse on-screen than on a page. Maybe I just cut paper more slack.
…'(The only thing that is evil and wrong and should never be written about is unicorns.)’… Even Beagle’s The last unicorn?
Oh, especially beagle.
And Lewis’s Jewel. Abominations, all.
Jay Lake: I am absolutely not talking about you.
Pauline: What Diana said.
Veejane: (pre-emptive submissive apology to the blog overlord!)
Blog overlord says, “Hmmmmmm.”
That’s interesting about the paragraphs. I have thought before about writing a book, but they never get fininshed and are really short anyway. Thanks for the advice!
(And you’re only a little crazy 🙂
i get sucked in to ever shorter paragraphs in my fiction, it is not good!
short paragraphs are more pressingly necessary in blog posts than in many other genres, because we can’t double-space or tab to separate paragraphs. it is a general rule that anything being presented in single-spaced chunks with a line of space between to mark paragraphs (book proposals or dissertation abstracts or what have you) needs to be divided into considerably shorter paragraphs for maximum ease of reading…
what did unicorns ever do to you?
white space is everyone’s friend, although not so much in newspaper. but breaking up the text is still a major thing, hence why layout is so important. it’s not just six columns, it’s six columns of text strategically broken up by photographs, graphics, pull quotes, headlines, subheads, etc., etc. even when white space itself is avoided, breaking up the text is still important.
(guilty look)
it’s actually an overcompensation thing with me. i naturally write over-short paragraphs, so i try to fatten them up.
but now they’re too long.
(sorry)
Just finished reading Ulysses and Molly’s… monologue, I guess, is the preferred term, is not big on paragraph breaks. So after getting through it, I’m much better than I was at reading long blocks of unpunctuated text.
But you’re right that well-timed paragraph breaks are good for those of us who aren’t as gifted as James Joyce.
In beginner fiction, you see paragraphs that contain every thought that particular character is having about the situation they are in.
Also, in Thomas Bernhard novels.
Side note: When working on long-form fiction, i.e., novels, I tend to collapse all paragraphs at some point in the writing process and re-paragraph late in the revision process.
I just worked through the copedit, all these wavy lines joining up my too short paragraphs.
that’d be copyedit. Copedit sounds half raunchy.
yes yes yes. long paragraphs give me headaches, but sometimes they work to great effect, like extended sections of film without an edit or musical phrases played without bowing or breathing (or cricket without a break for morning tea). a master artist can catch the reader in one and never let them out. or release them *changed*, which is the point of being a story-teller, i guess.
Lili: No need for guilty looks. Your novel is fabulous. That’s hilarious about how your paras wound up so long. You’ll have fun putting it back to how it was meant to be.
Aaron: Molly’s siloloquy is a wonderful example of long, long, long paragraphs (or is it just one?). Talk about your revery: “And yes he said yes . . . ”
Antoine: When working on long-form fiction, i.e., novels, I tend to collapse all paragraphs at some point in the writing process and re-paragraph late in the revision process.
Really? All of them? That’s a fascinating way to work. I’m defnitely still futzing around with paragraph length in the near-final draft. And often in page proofs. But all of them?
This is so true. I have always felt layout is important. Some people just think you can throw the words on the page and because they look zany – it’s cool. But, what’s the point of it, if nobody can understand what you’ve written.