​Paragraphs

I spend too much time wondering where the paragraph breaks should be. I’m taking a creative writing course and here’s basically what the instructor had to say about paragraphs.

If you’re writing a novel or short story or whatever, magine that you’re writing a film script. Whenever you think the director would cut to a new angle, that’s definitely a new paragraph.

So if someone is talking, and then someone else starts talking, the camera would usually move, and you’d start a new paragraph.

You might not start a new paragraph if you were signaling that the second speaker’s words were less important, more of a mere annotation to the main speaker. But if it’s actual dialogue, then go with a new paragraph for every new speaker.

Another example. Let’s say your guy is driving a car, and he stops at a light. In movies, when a car stops conspicuously at a light, it’s for a reason, and usually the angle changes. So that’s a new paragraph. The guy pulls up to a red and he sees something, so you start a new paragraph to talk about it.

So that’s one of my instructor’s little rules, sort of, but lots of exceptions, too. It’s basically just a way of thinking about where to put the paragraph breaks, because I think about that a lot, probably more than I should.