Paragraphs

At the very least, you want to have each scene be its own paragraph. Most scenes are made up of several paragraphs, and each separate idea within the scene needs its own paragraph. For instance, if you are describing a haunted house, that's one paragraph. Then, the MC walking up to the house is another. Internal dialogue about how scared he is might be another, etc. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "beat" in a script, but it's probably very similar.

Also, if there is dialogue, each time there is a switch between speakers, there needs to be a new paragraph.

-- Marcy

Thanks, OBE. I'm sure most anyone else could have answered your question just as well -- I just got here first.

-- Marcy

Hmm...

There is no such thing as a "short children's book." The range of ages means that the formats range as well.

A picture book, for example, would have very, very short paragraphs, if any at all. And it would never be ten pages long. Maximum is usually about 1000 words.

Ten pages without a single paragraph break would be about 2500 words, probably more. That's a very odd length for a kid's book. It's much too long to be a magazine story, and a little short to be a chapter book. And much too short to be a novel.

So let's call it a chapter book, since that's the closest it comes in length. Yes, there should be paragraph breaks. Many, many, many paragraph breaks. For that age, I would never let a paragraph go longer than three or four sentences. And those sentences should be fairly easy to read, with very few imbedded clauses. And those paragraphs should be grouped into chapters. 3000 words usually makes about a 5 or 6 chapter book.

You may need to suggest, ever so diplomatically, that your friend needs to study the children's market very, very carefully to figure out how to revise what she has written to make it fit into one of the standard children's formats.

She can get started by reading this article:
http://www.write4kids.com/colum44.html

She could also go to a bookshop and look up the type of book she's writing.

Since we don't have a general word count idea. Maybe it's just ultra large font and one or two sentences per page with pictures?

Many people have gotten used to forum formatting where tab simply doesn't move the begining of a paragraph over five spaces. It may be simply a formatting error.

If it reads more as a book without pictures, and regular sized print, it definately needs paragraphs.