Hello Writing-Community, So, a new paragraph starts when something new happens. That’s fact. It should help the reader. But I don’t understand why some authors make a single line (kinda like a break) and continue then with the writing. What is the good of this? Does the author wanna make a scene break like in Star Wars, doesn’t he/she? Can someone explain me this thing? Beehoney
first up paragraphs arent just when something new happens - they generally deal with a single point or idea Line breaks (also sometimes *** or --- ) are generally used to move from one scene to another
I'm just not quite clear what the "this thing" is. Is there a new scene after the thing? Like, a time jump or different characters or a different place?
Also because of space. If you really wanted to, you could make multiple scene changes withing a few hundred words. If you started of a new page every time, then that would be a ridiculous waste of pages.
There are different sizes of transition--a book (if you had a multi-volume series), sometimes a Part, a chapter, and a scene. Each transition gets a different amount of "Hey, reader, stuff is changing" warning. So there are different conventions for each transition. There's no particular cosmic reason why a scene change gets a typographic indicator rather than a new page, but since a chapter gets a new page, you need something smaller for a scene. If the question is why every scene doesn't get its own chapter, well, that would be a whole lot of chapters. I'm writing a chapter that introduces my female protagonist to a new situation and a new set of risks; it has a few scenes, but there's a unifying purpose for those scenes, so they'll get a chapter. (Depending on how I end up chaptering things, the entire situation, from entry to exit, may be just one chapter, but I think it will be more. We'll see.)
When I have scenes I separate them with *** but when I have a scene and there is some passage of time between the events happening in two adjacent paragraphs I do the blank line and from what I have seen most novels do that as well.
Traditionally the *** indicates a hard scene break while a blank line indicates just a regular, soft scene break.
@The Dapper Hooligan In some books I also saw instead of *** a diamond made of diamonds again. I mean the shape, not the stone.
You can do all sorts of shapes - they all mean the same thing - some books do a little picture like a rifle or a heart (depending on the context)
