When to use two and three line scene breaks?

It's a personal issue, there are no rules I am aware of...

House editors will have their own styles for breaks, so I would just stay consistent whatever you use...

By two lines I assume you mean a manual break. I tend to use them to indicate a change of POV, or a significant time lapse between scenes.

But three lines? I'm not sure you'd use that much at all and I'm curious to know if anyone else uses that size of break.

I'm not sure but I may be misunderstanding your question. Could you elaborate with perhaps an example?

Scene breaks are usually marked with a # in an otherwise blank line. That's it. You don't need some special number of lines for different kinds of scenes.

Author123 said:

Okay, so ONE line between paragraphs for scene breaks and TWO lines for POV changes or significant time lapse?

Click to expand...

No lines between paragraphs - just indent the next line (if you plan to format for Kindle, auto-indent using one of the arrows on the ruler bar).

A line between every paragraph only works online where indent function doesn't work.

One line then to separate different scenes (with * or # as mentioned above, more for reference than anything - useful for Kindle, but not mandatory for print. It's just to prevent a reader getting confused if the gap between scenes falls at the top or bottom of a page so that they don't notice the scene change).

Author123 said:

Okay, so ONE line between paragraphs for scene breaks and TWO lines for POV changes or significant time lapse?

Click to expand...

POV changes and time lapses are just different kinds of scene breaks. One line should do it.

Author123 said:

When do you use two lines to separate scenes and when do you use three lines?

Thanks.

Click to expand...

What's standard for manuscript formatting is to double-space, center a hash mark (#) , and double-space again.

Otherwise, for your own use, it doesn't matter, but I'd think you'd want to be consistent, whatever you choose, just to make things easier on yourself when it's time to clean it up for submission.

Author123 said:

Okay, so ONE line between paragraphs for scene breaks and TWO lines for POV changes or significant time lapse?

Click to expand...

You're making this way more complicated than it merits. No reason to use anything other than a single line break, and you should put a # or some other symbol on that line. The only other breaks you should need would be page breaks between chapters.

caw