Right, so I'm reading a book at the moment called "The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson, however there's something that I'm curious about with his general writing. Sometimes he spits paragraphs with a line break and indent on the next line, but sometimes he starts a new paragraph altogether with no indentation, like.... Or sometimes.... And I don't get it, why do you need to sometimes make a new paragraph altogether and sometimes just indent the next line?
Paragraphs separated by a blank line (or lines) signify a scene break. Scene breaks are used to show a shift in an idea, and it's sort of like the midpoint between starting a new paragraph and a new chapter (if that makes sense).
Oh okay, like a scene from a TV show where the screen goes blank and the camera appears somewhere else altogether?
This is a typesetting choice by the publisher of a specific book. Probably, as was suggested, the unindented paragraph with extra vertical space is a section break, but don't do that in your own manuscript. A section break in manuscript is signified bi a line containing only a centered hash mark (#), and is generally used to indicate a major scene change. Minor scene changes are more often shown by a simple new paragraph, with the first sentence in the new paragraph guiding the reader through the transition. Manuscripts are double spaced with no extra vertical space separating paragraphs. The first line of a new paragraph is indented a half inch.
