The Craft of Writing: Paragraphs (Part 1) · 1:45pm Feb 9th, 2016
Imagine, for a moment, the most exciting blog post you have ever read. The most exciting blog post you can even dream about. It has action, adventure, drama, sex, danger!
Yeah, something like that. Source.
Well, that's not what today's blog post is about. In fact, today's blog post is about the art of writing, so if that's not your thing, you can safely navigate away from this blog post. In fact, I recommend it, because otherwise this is going to be a boring half-hour or so for you.
Still with me? Awesome. Today I'm stealing a page from Bad Horse's book and talking about one of my favorite subjects: advanced writing techniques. Helping me is fellow EqD prereader Pascoite, and my super-good buddies GaPJaxie and Corejo, who you should check out (their writing, not their bodies).
Writing is not an isolated skill. It is a thousand techniques that each must be individually honed to craft a story, and the end result often only rises to the level of its lowest piece:
- Do you understand the fundamentals of grammar?
- Do you have a sufficiently developed functional vocabulary? That is, words you are comfortable using, not just hearing?
- Can you write believable, fluid dialogue?
- Can you develop characters?
- Can you think up plots for those characters to act out? A world for them to act in?
- Can you pace your story?
Those just scratch at the surface. I could spend hours trying to describe every facet of writing, and I would certainly fail to capture them all. I’m not an expert at this -- just a learned beginner.
But I have picked up a few things, and I’m often asked for advice on writing -- advice I feel woefully inadequate to give. The truth is, I don’t usually think about how I am writing. I just write, and years of practice and experience have made the process unconscious to me. I no longer pay attention to the details of what I am doing. I just write, and I know by feel if something is right or wrong.
With this series of blog posts, I’m going to try and take a step back from that ‘feeling,’ and describe in detail an aspect of how I write. I’m not going to claim that my way is the right way or the best way, only that it’s a way, and it works for me. Use this advice at your own peril.
Today we’re going to look at one of the most under-appreciated parts of writing: the paragraph.
How do you write a good paragraph? Why should you care?
English has a well-developed set of rules for crafting sentences, the smallest complete unit of thought. Almost every rule of grammar is based on the sentence -- proper verb tenses, comma splices, conjugation of clauses, using the various punctuation marks, etc. They are all ordered around how to make sentences that aren’t just functional or effective, but objectively correct or incorrect.
The following sentence is correct:
>Tim went running with his dog.
The following sentence is incorrect:
>Tim go ran dog his with.
I am not speaking subjectively when I say that the second sentence is wrong. The rules of English writing are absolutely clear on this point, and only the most avant-garde publications would accept something written that way. You may deliberately decide to write a sentence incorrectly, to achieve some effect, but that does not change the fact that it violates the rules of English usage and grammar.
Think for a moment about the mistakes you’re used to seeing in bad writing. To help you out, here’s the description of a story that was recently submitted to us for publication at EqD:
Starlight Glimmer was a specail unicorn. As in, she had special needs that made her easily angered an often picked on as a filly.
Then, after one of her bad days at school, she end up at a cave outside of her town that offers her to make the world in the way she wants it, where everypony is happy and isn't picked on. All they have to do, is give up there cutie marks and smile all the time no matter what.
Doesn't that. Sound fun?
This description has some errors in it. They are not difficult to find. If I showed that snippet to ten different editors, all ten should be able to identify the same errors and offer the same corrections. The rules of sentence construction are helpful like that.
Paragraphs are fundamentally different in that there are almost no rules regarding their construction. There is no equivalent to the Subject-Verb-Object structure of a sentence, or a required part, ala the sentence’s predicate.
There are guidelines aplenty, some of which we’ll mention later: how many actors should be in a paragraph, how to flow your dialogue, how long and short each paragraph should be. But these are considerations -- things to use at your discretion. Paragraph rules are much harder to find. In fact, the only hard-and-fast rule you will ever encounter for paragraphs is the dialogue rule: each new speaker in a dialogue must get their own paragraph.
Wrong:
“Did you draw that X?” Apple Bloom asked. Scootaloo leaned away. “I... no. It was like that when I found it.” Sweetie Belle eyed the mark and gave it a dainty sniff. “It smells like crayon.”
Right:
“Did you draw that X?” Apple Bloom asked.
Scootaloo leaned away. “I... no. It was like that when I found it.”
Sweetie Belle eyed the mark and gave it a dainty sniff. “It smells like crayon.”
That’s it. That is the only rule that you can ever be accused of breaking when it comes to composing paragraphs. Everything else is guidelines, suggestions and best practices.
In a sense this is liberating. You have a degree of freedom with paragraphs that does not exist with sentences. You may set your inner artist-child free to frolic with abandon, creating any kind of paragraph you like.
But at the same time this freedom is paralyzing. If you write a sentence, an editor has a vast body of rules to draw upon to determine if it is well-written. Sentences can be measured, corrected and judged, and two editors will often identify the same problems and offer the same suggestions for a broken sentence (as with our example above). The same cannot be said for paragraphs. The best we can say is “This could be more effective,” or “This doesn’t feel right.”
If you write effective paragraphs, your story will flow. The reader will be constantly drawn along, smoothly moving from one scene, action or event to the next. They will race through action scenes and stroll through character scenes, going at the pace you set.
Paragraphs are one of the little touches that set evocative, skilled writing apart from the merely pedestrian. They are one of the invisible aspects of writing, so rarely taught, that are nevertheless vital to making the transition from amateur to expert. So much of what we consider an author’s “style” exists in how they write paragraphs.
What makes a paragraph?
The purpose of a sentence is to convey meaning. The purpose of a paragraph is to control and organize the flow of information to the reader, and the most basic principle of paragraph construction is to use them to organize sentences by topic.
Take this description from a scene:
Rarity peeked out the blinds of her old room in her parents’ house. It hadn’t changed much over the years since she moved out, though her mother had started using it to store art supplies at some point, and now a collection of canvases and easels and paints filled an entire corner opposite the bed.
The street outside was filled with ponies going about their day. Rarity twisted the blinds shut, plunging the room into darkness.
She didn’t want any witnesses for this. A faint burst of magic from her horn locked the door securely shut, and she picked up the phone. A crude classified ad, torn from the back page of a seedy “alternative” newspaper, lay wrinkled on the desk before her.
The phone rang and rang. She was about to set the handset down in the cradle when the line clicked over, and the faint hiss of a weak connection filled her ear.
“Yeah?” a rough voice asked.
That’s a selection from one of my stories, and it’s very much written in my style. The paragraphs are relatively short, ranging from one to three sentences long, broken up either by topic or by action. To see what I mean, here is the same segment, but with only the first sentence from each paragraph:
Rarity peeked out the blinds of her old room in her parents’ house.
The street outside was filled with ponies going about their day.
She didn’t want any witnesses for this.
The phone rang and rang.
“Yeah?” a rough voice asked.
I just cut 75 percent of the words out of that scene, but a surprising amount of meaning is retained.Those five sentences, by themselves, tell a complete story.
*Pascoite disagrees! He says: If we're talking about a series of paragraphs of pure narration, I think this is true most of the time. Not so much the case for dialogue, as people don't speak that way.
For another exception, I've had people tell me that if you're going to drop a bombshell, do it as the last sentence of the paragraph. As with any rule, I don't think this is always the case, but I tend to think it's good enough to accept as a guideline.
Another case is when a new paragraph starts almost out of necessity. The best example I can come up with is that the paragraph begins because there's a sudden break from what came before. Something interrupts speech or the first-person narrator's train of thought. I hammer on authors for this all the time. Speech gets cut off, then the narrator yammers on for a sentence before we find out what did the cutting off. So that interruption needs to follow the cutoff immediately, and while it's possible that's the critical element of the following paragraph, I don't think it will necessarily be often enough to call it part of that rule.
This suggests an essential truth about paragraphs: The first sentence in a paragraph is the most critical. It is more important than everything else in the paragraph combined*.
Readers are lazy. This is a sad fact that every author must come to grips with at some point – all of our delicately crafted sentences, clever turns of phrase and beautiful wordsmithing are likely to be overlooked.
We are all guilty of this. When we read, we unconsciously search for the important parts of a text. Dialogue almost always gets read, because it is critical to the story. Short paragraphs are almost always read, because we have been trained from childhood that short paragraphs are important and contain some sort of punchy, vital piece of information.
Long paragraphs describing a room?
A character’s extended internal musings?
Your brilliant description of the sunrise?
God forbid, lyrics? Italicized lyrics?
These are all easy targets for the lazy reader to overlook. We’ve simply read too much over the course of our lives, and all that reading has given us unconscious queues. When we encounter a long paragraph, we read the first sentence and decide, without thinking, “Is there anything important hiding in this big chunk of text?”
Too often, the answer is no, and the reader moves to the next paragraph. Repeat ad nauseum.
What does this suggest? If you want readers to pay attention to your whole paragraph, you must hook them with the first sentence. Hooks are not just for stories -- every level of your story must fight to keep the reader’s attention, or you risk losing them to boredom or distraction, and you might not get them back. Always, always fight for your reader’s attention, even when it comes to something as small as a paragraph.
When do I stop a paragraph? When should I start a new one?
Confession time: I am incapable of writing long paragraphs.
I just can’t. Paragraphs max out at around five lines for me. Most are three to four lines. Many are just one line, though I try to limit those as much as possible.
If paragraphs are how we organize information for the reader, then we can start to draw some postulates about their construction. Here are some of the things I believe about paragraphs. You are not obligated to believe them, and in fact I acknowledge that they are opinions rather than facts:
1. A paragraph should convey information on a single topic.
2. A paragraph should include dialogue from no more than one person (with rare exceptions).
3. Generally, a paragraph should feature no more than a single actor.
Point 2 is a rule of paragraphs and shouldn’t arouse any dispute. Point 3 is contestable and subjective, and we’ll get into it in more detail later. For now, let’s look at point 1 and what it implies.
*Pascoite disagrees again! He says: I don't know that I'd agree with this. If we're getting a lot of detail about the fighter pilot pulling some hard G's to execute an Immelman and get the sun to his six, it could work, or the knight's internal train of thought as he charges with his lance. It has to be done with care, of course, or the link between pace and action level gets broken, but I wouldn't be surprised to see one of these every so often in an action sequence.
Think about the long paragraphs you’ve read. Chances are, they aren’t action oriented*. They’re probably descriptive, and deal with an environment or a person the author wants to spend a lot of time and effort detailing for the reader. But in the end, that whole long paragraph is just describing a single environment or a single character.
Think about the short paragraphs you’ve read. Chance are they are action-oriented, or are a punch-in-the-gut line the author wants to emphasize. Consider this, the last two paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Short paragraphs don’t convey as much raw information, but they have impact. Compared with longer paragraphs, they are more effective at seizing the reader’s attention and presenting him with something he will remember.
Does this mean short paragraphs are superior to long ones? It does not, because a succession of short paragraphs will quickly becoming tiring and repetitive. The reader will feel like he is being bombarded with information. Long paragraphs, and medium ones too, provide variety and help the author control the flow of a story. Longer paragraphs are a tool for the author to slow the reader down and force them to focus on the details. When do we want the reader to focus on details?
- Descriptions of a character.
- Describing an engrossing experience, like a musician’s first time on stage.
- Descriptions of an important environment (i.e. one critical to the plot, like a crime scene. Not every scene in a story has a critical environment).
- Dialogue, such as a speech, that is for some reason longer than normal conversational dialogue.
Here is an example of a long dialogue paragraph. The speaker is Merry the hobbit from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Rings, explaining the history of the Old Forest to Frodo:
“I don't know what stories you mean,” Merry answered. “If you mean the old bogey stories Fatty's nurses used to tell him, about goblins and wolves and things of that sort, I should say no. At any rate I don't believe them. But the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don't do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be most alarming, or so I am told. I have only once or twice been in here after dark, and then only near the hedge. I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them in. In fact long ago they attacked the Hedge: they came and planted themselves right by it, and leaned over it. But the hobbits came and cut down hundreds of trees, and made a great bonfire in the Forest, and burned all the ground in a long strip east of the Hedge. After that the trees gave up the attack, but they became very unfriendly. There is still a wide bare space not far inside where the bonfire was made.”
The Fellowship of the Rings, Chapter 6
And here is an example of a long paragraph used to describe a scene in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Most writers couldn’t get away with writing paragraphs like this, and I certainly don’t recommend it. In fact, I’m not sure Pynchon really expects his readers to burrow through this mess, or if he was just using the mass of text as a sort of metaphor for how crowded Slothrop’s desk is:
There must be cubicles like this all over the ETO: only the three dingy scuffed-cream fiberboard walls and no ceiling of its own. Tantivy shares it with, an American colleague, Lt. Tyrone Slothrop. Their desks are at right angles, so there’s no eye contact but by squeaking around some 90°. Tantivy’s desk is neat, Slothrop’s is a godawful mess. It hasn’t been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop’s mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk . . . above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including “Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland” (“He does have some rather snappy arrangements,” Tantivy reports, “he’s a sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing,” but Bloat’s decided he’d rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl . . . a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall—a dictionary of technical German, an P.O. Special Handbook or Town Plan—and usually, unless it’s been pinched or thrown away, a News of the World somewhere too—Slothrop’s a faithful reader.
Gravity’s Rainbow, Chapter 2
It goes without saying that very few of the details in that huge paragraph are really essential to the story. You could be forgiven for skipping the whole thing, and I suspect that’s what most people who claim to have read Gravity’s Rainbow actually ended up doing.
I don’t recommend writing paragraphs that long. Both The Fellowship of the Rings and Gravity’s Rainbow are older works, and the modern style of writing leans much more heavily toward streamlined writing that flows quickly. You won’t find anything like those paragraphs in The Hunger Games.
But long paragraphs are still essential; think of paragraphs of different lengths as various tools available for your use. A short paragraph is a hammer. Use it sparingly, but to great effect. Overuse of short paragraphs, outside of dialogue, quickly makes the reader grow tired and they lose their effect.
In other words, you can only punch your reader in the face so many times before they start to go numb. Mix things up, so when the short paragraphs do appear, they’ve got their punch.
How do you arrange the order of sentences in a paragraph?
There are no set rules for ordering sentences within a paragraph, but there are a few methods we can use:
- As noted before, the first sentence should be the critical one. It is the sentence you most want the reader to retain.
- After the first, additional sentences within a paragraph can be ordered temporally; A happened, then B happened, then C happened.
- Or they can be ordered, as when describing a scene, in some sort of physical precedence: describing a person’s clothing from head to feet, or describing the contents of a room from large to small.
Whichever method you use, remember that the two parts of the paragraph most likely to be remembered by the reader are the first sentence and the last. This effect, known as primacy and recency, has been understood by orators going back as far as Aristotle. Do not, however, let it lead you into the trap of only preferring short paragraphs, which have only a first and last sentence. Yes, they are more easily recalled by the reader, but that sort of writing quickly devolves into monotony. As always, balance your writing with long, medium and short.
How do you interweave dialogue with narrative in a paragraph?
We already know that each new speaker gets a new paragraph. But what if we want to portray a single speaker going on at some length on a topic, while also carrying out an action? Humans, after all, are capable of speaking while doing other things.
Take, as an ordinary but well crafted example, this section of dialogue from GaPJaxie’s Intern:
In front of her, Twilight tapped the desk. “Five minutes,” she said sternly, shutting the door behind Ant Mill.
“Oh.” Ant Mill nodded, taking a second to catch her breath. “Oh, thank you! Uh... so you’re really Twilight Sparkle?”
“This is an inauspicious start to your limited time.” Twilight said, holding eye contact with Ant Mill.
“Oh, right, sorry,” Ant Mill said quickly. Her eyes went all over the room—looking at the desk, the floor, the ceiling, anything but the pony she actually wanted to look at. Finally, the found the courage to look the other pony head on. “It’s just... that would make you like two thousand years old, right?”
Twilight nodded. “Two thousand and seven next month.”
“Do you still celebrate birthdays?” Ant Mill asked.
“Yes.” Twilight let out a curt little sigh, her eyes rolling slightly.
“Uh... why?” Ant Mill said, her tail giving a little swish back and forth as she rubbed one hoof over the other.
“Because my husband insists,” Twilight said, with a slight edge to her tone. “He thinks I’m embarrassed about my age and the party makes me feel better.”
This section of dialogue has just about every permutation possible when it comes to mixed narrative and speech. We have lines that start with narrative, have speech in the middle, and end with narrative. We have lines that start with speech, have narrative in the middle, and end with more speech. We have lines that start with speech and end with narrative, and lines that start with narrative and end with speech.
This is a textbook example of variety in dialogue. Just about the only thing it’s missing is dialogue by itself, with no narrative:
“Oh.” She frowned and stared down at the ground for a moment before looking back at me, her eyes wide with the spark of an idea. Her ears perked back up, and she grinned. “Hey, you could live with me!”
“What?”
“Yeah! You’re a pegasus now. You need a cloud home, not a castle!”
“But—”
“I’ve got an extra room you can have, and a kitchen! You can cook, right? I think I have a stove or something. We can share the bathroom because I usually sleep in most days so it won’t matter if you use all the hot water and—”
“Rainbow Dash.” I stopped her with a light touch of my hoof on the tip of her muzzle. “That’s very sweet of you to offer, but I can’t live in a cloud home.”
Aside from the rule about one speaker per paragraph, we are free to combine dialogue and narrative as much as we want. However, as with all things paragraph, there are still some guidelines that make for more effective writing.
One of these is how much we mix dialogue and narrative. The more we mix them, the more complex the paragraph becomes, and the more we risk losing our reader. Take this example:
But what Aria said next was something else entirely. “This is why I should be the leader,” she snarled. “You always let our enemies walk all over us, King Neptune, Starswirl, the Rainbooms, all of them. And the centuries have only made you softer, Adagio. If we followed my lead back at the school, we’d be queens of this stinking 'hole by now, and Equestria.” She straightened her back, suddenly appearing as the tallest of the three. “Maybe I should call the shots from now one, given your track record. What do you say, Sonata?”
The Invisible Chain, by AintNoTh1ng
This paragraph has six distinct sections: Narrative, dialogue, narrative, dialogue, narrative, dialogue. There’s nothing explicitly wrong with that many parts, but it’s more than I’m comfortable including in a single paragraph.
You also have to be wary of burying your dialogue. Buried dialogue is hidden deep within a paragraph that appears to be entirely narrative, and runs the risk that the reader will skip right over it:
With every step the air chilled and the land somehow got bleaker until nothing grew and silence reigned, Discord couldn't shift the uneasy feeling he was being watched, but with little choice he pressed on. Eventually Discord reached the black city, obsidian battlements rose high into the sky manned by what appeared to be shadows, the foreboding gates oozed a black mist the consumed all that it touched in a deathly haze, it was all so wrong. Using magic Discord attempted to look pass the illusion manning the towers and the gates but revealed nothing, "That can't be right," Discord muttered. With no alternative Discord reached out to knock but the gates parted before he made contact, "Well someone was throwing down the welcoming mat," Discord gulped and passed into the city, his quips doing little to lift the dread he felt. Taking every step towards the keep cautiously, Discord took note of the darkened alleys between the black buildings, sickly yellow eyes much like his own glared at him from all directions watching silently as he passed.
The Light of the Four, by hoodedfigurine
There are six lines of text and nearly a hundred words in that paragraph before we get to the actual dialogue. Completely aside from the fact that the dialogue is simply liable to be skipped, Pascoite reminded me that the entire point of a paragraph is to organize your story. Dialogue and narrative serve different purposes -- they accomplish different things. If you don’t use your paragraphs to separate them, you’re not letting them shine like they should.
So, that’s… wow, 10 pages on paragraph construction! And we’re not even done yet!
In part two we’ll look at one of the most critical and under-appreciated points of paragraph construction: how many actors should be in each paragraph, and why does it matter?
I love you for mentioning this, and for the reminder not to rely overmuch on it. My wife studies neuroscience and communication, and spent her Ph.D. doing time-series analysis of continuous-response data from public service announcements, and both the relative importance and the degree of interaction between these effects is crazy convoluted.
As you said at the beginning, there's no substitute for practice and experience - the difference between a decent writer and a great one is not some set of rules, but that ability to feel whether or not something works.
Well, now I'm going to go through the paragraphs of the story I'm tinkering with one more time.
Easily one of the best blogs I've read in a long time. Thanks for sharing it!
Great refresher on some things I'd internalised without thinking very deeply about them.
Nice examples, too. I was actually skimming through some dialogue in a story-in-progress of mine just the other night, making sure the descriptors were varied as in the examples you picked out*. Interspersing dialogue with small immediate actions or expressions** is still something I'm learning.
Cues.
* Mainly making sure I hadn't done this over and over:
"Blah," said F.
"Bleh," said S.
"Bloh," said F.
** You can do such neat things by showing tiny details instead of spelling out characters' feelings in big clumsy letters, that I really want to get good at it:
"Blah." F scrubbed at their eyes.
"Bleh," said S, who thought no such thing.
F nodded vehemently. "Bloh!"
You have my interest.
i827.photobucket.com/albums/zz194/PepperPilot5/mECHavallian.jpg~original
Seriously, mad props for writing all this. It couldn't have been easy/quick.
Coincidentally, this is exactly what I needed. Thank you for taking the time to write this up. I appreciate it.
I've always done paragraphs like I do everything: with frenetic energy and a lack of foresight. This is a character flaw and I'm always surprised when people assume I don't know that it is. I'm painfully aware of that long patch of purple where the battle is joined and it all goes mythic, yeah, it hurts me as much as you. But... I don't know how else to be. If I edit out all the flowing, building floweriness I have litterally almost nothing left.
Which is sort of depressing.
One thing I've always wondered about is an old habit of mine: long paragraph building up to a single sentence, which then is its own paragraph between two sort of whirlwind descriptive or active paragraphs. Kind of this, from my newest thing:
The problem here is that, said aloud, that mildly long pause is perfect. I've always written dialogue thinking about the stage, and that pause on stage would be agonizingly perfect--the reflection, the quick change in the air, that twisting face and look of dismay, and then boom this slow statement. However, this is text on a page in prose, and not a stage direction, and I'm not sure that this works or not. I've seen it in others and I've liked it, but I'll like anything.
Making me feel far better about my own insecurity. Sometimes I look over a page of my text and hold it up to another author's, and mine just ends up looking... staccato. Short and sharp with less substance.
It's also just what I find easiest to read. That's not a coincidence.
You and Pascoite both come very close to a single, simple word: Bookends. The reader's eye is drawn to the first and last line in a paragraph, with the middle bits often being glossed over as 'filler'.
The mind doesn't see the paragraph as a traditional burger, it sees it like it sees the KFC Double Down! When you see a single line of dialogue split up into two parts, how often do you just skip your eyes over the middle bit describing the action of the speaker? More than you'd probably notice, or care to admit.
There's also a hard and fast rule in screenwriting: Any paragraph of five lines or more will not be read.
That's it. Simple as that. Each genre has different emphasis on length, and dialogue may break the rule into confetti but, honestly? If your paragraph has gone more than five lines on an A4 page, try to find where you should cut it.
It's important to be aware of paragraph variation though. When you can see the paragraphs grow and shrink like high-and-low tide on a beach, growing and receding, it makes each individual paragraph easier to read. I've been demonstrating it now, actually, combining longer sentences when I explain with shorter sentences when I emphasize. The paragraphs, too.
Oh! Before I get further and see if you beat me to it:
Unless the characters are being directly compared, contrasted or conflicting. It wouldn't alliterate so easily if I were wrong!
Wait...
This is what I get for starting writing comments while ideas are still fresh before finishing the darn blog post.
... okay, so did you beat me to it if you've already dedicated a blog post about it, but it hasn't been written yet? Bah and humbug.
Can we talk about something that goes woefully undermentioned in general, but is very relevant indeed to most of us: paragraph separation and formatting in an online medium?
You will note that in all of his examples, CiG uses the "standard" that this site, and AO3, and FFnet, and indeed nearly all online writing, from blog posts to news articles, follows these days: no indentation, every paragraph separated by a line break.
You'll almost never read anything published in dead tree format that way. The text is all one solid block with indentation used to mark out new paragraphs. Actual breaks in the text usually only occur at narrative break points such as chapter transitions (various formatting standards exist for this but a common one is to skip to the next turned page) or to mark important scene changes and time skips.
Only we don't do that with online writing, because it looks fucking awful to most of us and is impossible to read comfortably. Let's take a look:
Look at that text block. It's... okay, but just okay, and that's only a few hundred words out of this 5000 word post. Who wants to read 5000 words of that on their screen? Almost nobody!
You occasionally encounter someone who posts their work online using this traditional format, and I can't speak for everyone, but for a lot of people it utterly kills their desire to read it. They look at the text wall and nope right the hell away. I've passed up promising stories because my eyes completely rebelled, as well as long-form journalistic pieces I was deeply interested in (often published on the online portals of traditional publishing outfits,) because my eyes told my brain "yeah, no, fuck YOU."
And this is interesting to me because the different construction alters how you'll edit and flow a story. Snappy back-and-forth dialogue exchanges seem to work better with the online formatting, for example, because the lack of indentation and the line breaks gives you a nice bang-bang-bang patter, like in the Twilight Sparkle/Rainbow Dash exchange up above. You might not want to write dialogue in that way if you were working with indentations in a text well; you might want to break it up a little.
Fantastic stuff guys. Hopefully I'll be able to make use of this: I find myself abundant of ideas and not the wherewithal to actually sit down and write them. I eagerly look forward to the rest of this.
I found a few points to disagree with, as well as agreeing with Pascoite's disagreements. Namely the point about "one actor one paragraph" as Mr. Numbers pointed out above. The following is totally fine, even the correct thing to do,
The alternative being,
Which is undesirably sparse (and I'd argue just a tad more flat).
I think long paragraphs are more difficult to do right, but absolutely vital to a story having a good narrative flow. And flow is the main thing you need to get right for long paragraphs. The writing should go from sentence to sentence in a way which makes it effortless to read.
Hey now, if you keep them brief, they're totally fine. I'll skip 3 or more stanzas, but a single one or two I think a majority of people will read. Usually if a character is singing I'd write one, maybe two, and then just describe them singing in narrative.
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wrt that long/short question, you might be interested to read CiG's comments on paragraph formatting when he reviewed my story Quiet Boy and Moon Horse in the last Writeoff Original Fiction round (which I suspect to be the genesis of this post):
Given that he praised that exact same sort of buildup-and-punch (and made the same points in the post above), I suspect that he would have no problem at all with yours. And as far as I'm concerned, it works. [1]
Of course, I'm not exactly an unbiased source, given that I write the same way — but if you'll forgive a moment of immodesty, if your writing technique is appreciated by the top two authors of a competition that's judged based on anonymous entries, you're probably doing something right.
--
[1] I spent five minutes trying to figure out whether this sentence was best put here or in the paragraph below.
Yes, always be mindful of your readers.
Or not. There is a stubborn side to the artistic spirit which does not enjoy submitting in its methods. If you wish to not compromise, so be it. As long as you willingly ignore some characteristic of your readers in favor of your own tastes and intentions, understanding what it might cost you, then I can accept that.
After all, there is a limit to being mindful of your readers. If you're not careful, you will end up letting your conception of them write your story, instead of you the author. You will become a captive.
Anyone can write after the fashion of the times, and anyone can rebel. I say screw fashion and screw rebellion. Let the effect you wish to render on your reader guide you instead, which will join both artistic intent and attention to the reader in a healthy balance.
This is just the kind of blog I hope to find. Thanks for the writing advice.
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That example is an illuminating one — because I agree with you on principle that it's better than the alternative, but the single-paragraph construction isn't problem-free either, and the relevant question isn't a matter of "correct" but of "least bad".
The issue there with a single paragraph is that switching actors midstream makes false implications about the dialogue, leading to a loss of clarity. This is how my brain parsed it before the cognitive dissonance forced me to go back and deduce meaning:
And this is what's actually going on:
Nine times out of ten, I would still rather have it than the facepunch of "Rainbow Dash nodded." on its own (giving undue emphasis to an incidental detail that the dialogue is attempting to streamline through), but I don't think it's controversial to say that loss of clarity is bad. Sometimes it's worthwhile to address that by retagging the dialogue —
— but even that isn't great, as you've now got five chunks (dialogue, action, dialogue, tag, dialogue) for three short and simple sentences.
You can also recast the action sentence to avoid that, by shifting actors twice in immediate succession:
… which is often the least objectionable fix — but you have to introduce additional, unnecessary action, and if the focus of your paragraph is the dialogue you're starting to dilute it.
I think this is a case where, if the text around it supports it, implication can be your friend:
or even
But that's not always appropriate: what if, say, Dash is surprised that Twilight is addressing her (or offended at the question, etc.), and it's important to note her reaction?
So basically, you've got a whole bunch of tools in the toolbox, all of which are going to leave different dents as they wedge the sentence into place. The craft of writing is in figuring out which disfiguration goes best with the overall surface finish of the piece.
… I'm beginning to see why CiG left this for part two.
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That's usually what I do, too, but I wanted to keep my example short.
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Gonna agree with horizon here. But first, it's worth pointing out that although Rainbow Dash does take an action in this sentence, she still isn't the subject of the sentence -- Twilight is. The clause 'to which Rainbow Dash nodded' is a dependent clause.
If I had to reword it (which I'm not sure is needed,) I would reword it along the lines that horizon did:
Now we have unity of actor. "After Rainbow Dash nodded" is a prepositional phrase, and "she" (Twilight) is the subject of the second sentence.
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An example below (typos preserved), from Charles Stross' Ship of Fools, takes the form of your latter-most case to an extreme, with the the recipient of the speaker's words being at least two audiences at different times, even going so far as to change addressee mid-sentence. The actions, rather than interposed via narration, are instead implied and/or unspecified until the end, where a separate paragraph becomes involved.
Is this a good pattern to use regularly? Probably not. However, it can be used for style—or for effect as, for example, a means of downplaying, omitting, or otherwise conveying separately the actions of the recipient(s).
Dialog(ue)-only stories, to which I admit having written a handful, will take this omission-to-implication even further.
At the risk of being redundant: the 'proper' choice—as distinct from 'correct'—follows from intent.
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I agree that this is an important thing to recognize; with an infinite amount of space, having a full line break between lines can greatly improve readability, but it does also make one-liner back-and-forths eat up an awful lot of page space, which can make the writing appear very sparse.
Incidentally, sometimes I'll end up doing both a full line of white space AND indent my paragraphs. I think it actually works okay, and adds a bit of extra texture to the text, though it makes quick one-liner back and forths stick out even more.
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I don't think that the three one-liners there actually looks bad, and if two characters are having a back and forth conversation, doing it like that can help maintain the back-and-forth flow of things, as each character has a "line" there (the nod basically being Rainbow Dash saying "yes").
One thing I have to admit I personally have often struggled with the sort of "wanting characters to emote in response to someone else's action" thing. For instance, from one of my older stories:
You can see the middle paragraph there is kind of a clusterfuck. What is going on is reasonably apparent, but it is really quite mangled, interspersing Rainbow Dash's dialogue with Fluttershy's actions. I think a better approach would be something like:
Not perfect, but I think it parses a lot better than the original incarnation.
Ugh, reading this story is making me itchy to do a bunch of editing on it.
Incidentally, shorter and longer paragraphs are useful for the purposes of pacing. A story full of long paragraphs will tend to feel slow and sedate compared to a story full of short ones. Long paragraphs give the impression of more time passing, while short, choppy paragraphs give the impression of swift action.
That said, there are exceptions - for example, having a bunch of actions flowing one into the next in a single paragraph can give a sense of desperation, as there is no time, no opportunity for a break in the action, just one thing after another after another. It can also give a sort of slow-motion effect like you see in a movie, where some incredibly important thing happens and the action slows down so you can see every shard of glass tinkling through the air. It isn't the exact same effect, but it can have a similar impact on the reader where some event which takes place in less than a second is explained in a big paragraph, highlighting its importance and focusing us in on the action.
You can also use paragraphs to manipulate a readers' impression of time's passage. Having long paragraphs about short periods of time can reinforce a character being hyper-alert, noticing everything around them, or feeling like time is crawling by. It can ramp up a sense of anxiety or impatience, as the character looks around, but doesn't see anything to break up the monotony of waiting. Likewise, having a short paragraph which contains some vitally important thing can further heighten its impact. Sometimes, a line of dialogue is at its most powerful when it stands alone, without even any dialogue tags or actions or whatever.
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Re the clusterfuck paragraph, see 3743774 for some alternatives, although in your specific case I agree that spacing it out feels like a good choice. Both of your surrounding paragraphs already mix dialogue and action tags, and concatenating them would give you a brain-busting eight chunks, only one of which switches actors.
Harmony Needs Heroes did actually use this concatenation technique in a longer paragraph, but it only used five chunks (one of which is "Scratch continued"):
That's about my upper limit — unless I'm writing to deliberate artsy effect, like with the last sentence of Stellar Fire.
I wish I wasn't poor so I could attend more proper college English classes. I miss them. Math, too.
I can't contribute to the analysis at the big kid level, like Horizon and company, but I enjoy these sorts of posts all the same. Learning is always a treat.
This is the single best piece of writing advice ever given.
Definitely. I just finished Background Pony and although I enjoyed it, I definitely found myself skimming when Lyra got a little too philosophical. Alternatively I do remember enjoying the long, action paragraphs of The Immortal Game because it helped draw you into the fights.
Also I love that you used Jaxie as your example on mixing narrative with dialogue! Their use of subtle body movements throughout is one of my favorite aspects of their writing.
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To me, 'she' and equivalents always refer to the most recently specified character, so your change actually exaggerated the issue...
Out of the alternatives given here, the ones that worked best for me are horizon's last attempt and, funnily enough, the original text. Since the main speaker in the paragraph was already established to be Twilight, it felt natural that she was still the one speaking, despite Dash's interjecting action.
You discuss the topic with authority and clarity. A very useful and insightful read! In all my paragraphs ahead, I'll call-back an echo of what I read here, and do a little bit better than otherwise I might have done.
Particularily nice is - I think - that an educational piece like this equips a person to better understand and argue their corner, whether it be in agreement or contention with the opinions used to make the piece.
You're really great thank you
Nicely written! Re. this:
I do that on purpose, to avoid monotony. Now I don't know how to decide whether it's a good thing, or a bad thing.
Re. this:
This makes it sound like you should sometimes fill paragraphs with unimportant padding, just to make some of them long, to avoid monotony. I think there must be some positive value to writing long paragraphs. Mere padding to vary paragraph length doesn't sit well with me. I think that what you call "monotony" must mean a lack of some other flavor that only long paragraphs have.
3743239 In the ancient world, that would have been written like this:
For which we still hunger.
4057740 Or rather, for whom we are hungry?
Part 2 when?