Are the guidelines for paragraph breaks solidly defined? (also, internal dialog & paragraph breaks)

My personal thought is that how one constructs paragraphs is a matter of voice--so yes, paragraph breaks can serve as a means of emphasis.

Not sure how to answer your other questions--what POV are you writing in?

I would probably post the whole section in syw when you reach 50.

I personally am not a fan of onomatopoeia so take that into account. I don't feel it is helping much in the passage above, and (I would argue) is breaking up your narrative. I appreciate it's not the real MS, but I can only go on what's posted.

But if you do include it then it should be punctuated like anything else. As written it reads like incorrect punctuation to me.

Ah, okay--so you're writing in third person POV.

I would personally vote for the second, and roll the internal dialogue right into narrative. But watch structures like "She wondered if she'd be able to even find the door..." because they can add distance through the filtering structure of "she wondered if..." (and that's fine, if adding distance is what you want.) If you want a tauter, tighter feeling, you can go instead with something like "Would she be able to find the door without waking him?"

And ditto to what Harlequin said about the onomatopeia. And about posting in Share Your Work when you've reached 50 posts. You can go in there now and offer critiques--it's a great way to gain fresh perspective on your own writing.

Reading helps a lot with this. Read books of the same category as the ones you are writing.


Firstly: Childrens books have more paragraph breaks, "Creak!" type of sounds and "Oh no!" type of internal dialoge. More paragraph breaks can also be found in places where it is really, really important to put emphasize on some actions. Like, when the main character in a horror story discovers the monster, or something similar that needs to have a big impact on the reader.


In a children's book you can describe how the monster pops out of the cupboard and then include a paragraph break and put "Boo!" in a new paragraph. All that will be fine because for children this is a very scary moment and the paragraph break will be needed to show how dramatic this moment is.


In adult books you wouldn't really have many occasions where you really, really need to include "Boo!" on a new paragraph, because adults won't find it as scary, or dramatic, as to justify having its own paragraph break. Of course, if your scary moment in an adult book is totally, greatly scary (and dramatic), do include a paragraph break to make the readers jump out of their seats. Bottom line is, the reader should feel that the paragraph break is justified.


Secondly: Internal dialogue tends to huddle together with the rest of the text within the paragraph. Unless it gets wild and escapes. Again, as noted above, there are certain expectations about paragraph breaks, and as long as your internal dialogue complies with those, it can be set apart in a new paragraph.


Thirdly: I'm not quite sure what you mean by "response by a charater (or spoken response)". Spoken responce = dialogue? Response = internal dialogue or action? There are rules about dialogue, and sort of rules about internal thoughts.
The "presence of so much action" doesn't influence paragraph breaks.


In your unbroken/paragraphed examples: You can't go wrong if you put dialogue in a new paragraph. You could also put dialogue in the same paragraph as the narration, as long as it's clear who's talking. That's a more tricky thing to do, so read, read, read a lot first, to get the knack of it. In your example, you alternate between the two characters a lot, so it may be confusing who's speaking if there is no tag.


As for the internal "Oh no!", in the example here that's overly melodramatic and sounds oldfashioned or cartoonish. There are other ways to express internal thoughts. If you do need the words as they are in the example - I'd say maybe you need a paragraph break, or maybe you don't. Depends.You don't really want your text to be cut into little chunks of three sentences each. A paragraph break is, as you mentioned yourself, about starting a new "idea". It's a sort of a change where the narrative takes a turn and goes somewhere else. If you have a paragraph break after every three sentences, it starts to feel like your narrative is zig-zagging and that's annoying to read. So, if this happens, the writer should go back to revise the text and change it, so that the sentences are combined in to larger chunks/bigger paragraphs.

One of the first thing I realised when I started writing at home, not just at school is that you have to take what English teachers at school say with a suitable quantity of salt. Of course, there are rules regarding spelling, punctuation and grammar that have to be followed (but in creative writing slang and informal phrases are fine if they fit the context, while in formal writing they're not*) but a lot of other things aren't written in stone or even aren't good advice for creative writing at all.

*though even at work (boring financial sector day job) we've been specifically trained not to be too formal with customer and internal communications and to use contractions and sound friendly, etc.

For example: English teachers will encourage students to use lots of "interesting words" and encourage sentences jammed up with extra words like adverbs, adjectives and swapping "boring" words like said, went, etc with "interesting" alternatives... the learning objective in this is to expand kids' vocabularies and get them to feel confident in using new and unfamiliar words. However, this leads to "purple prose" which can be painful to read and for creative writing you have to consider things like flow and not drawing attention to the wrong things in your sentence. Like with dialogue, the reader's attention should be on what's being said, and things like "he barked raucously" or "she announced defiantly" and similar draw attention to themselves instead of what's important.

Another example would be teachers developing kids' confidence in using complex and compound sentences, which tends to lead to them saying that simple sentences are "boring" and will discourage "I have a dog called Rover" and encourage sentences like "My dog Rover, a terrier-doberman cross, likes to play in the garden and whenever I get home he always runs up to me with a ball in his mouth" which probably would read more smoothly as two sentences. There are countless examples in creative writing when the first sentence would be better than the second. The best advice is to vary sentence length and go with what sounds right. And there's nothing inherently wrong with very long sentences - it's just harder to make them flow well.

So to answer your question about how rigid rules are... some rules are set in stone. Other rules aren't rules at all but are advice given for specific circumstances that usually apply but shouldn't be followed rigidly in every circumstance and there may be times when following them leads to mega awkward sentences. You said in another thread about trusting your ear... definitely trust your ear. (And excuse my mega awkward sentence lol.)

Going back to your question about paragraphs... English teachers don't want students to hand in walls of text. The advice "one idea per paragraph" is a good rule of thumb and teachers have to teach stuff in a simple way to start off with and get the subtleties in later. Paragraphing is one thing where you can trust your gut. If you feel like there needs to be a paragraph break, then put one in. Avoid having gargantuan paragraphs. Sometimes one idea may go on way too long to be just one paragraph. It needs to be broken down into chunks. Other times you can have a few related ideas in one paragraph as long as they're all brief enough that you don't end up with a gigantic super-paragraph.

Paragraphing for dialogue has more specific rules, because you need to avoid confusing the reader with regards to who's doing/saying what. Start a new paragraph when another character says or does anything. Each character gets a paragraph for their bit in the conversation.

"Blah blah blah" said Jack. He does an action here.

Jane does something in response. "Blah blah blah blah blah." (Jane's saying this but you don't need "said Jane" because it's on the same paragraph as the action that Jane just did so you know Jane said it.)

"Oh no, you're wrong," said George, "it's blah blah blahity blah."

Jane looked at him angrily. "Go away and leave us alone."

(etc)

Paragraphing guidelines are not generally set in concrete. Some are firmer than others (in dialogue, new speaker = new paragraph). Often, though, the guidelines are somewhere in the mud. So, generally speaking, you change paragraphs:


--when there's a change in the action

--when you want to make a sentence into its own paragraph for dramatic emphasis

--when you have a particularly long paragraph that could be broken up (not all long paragraphs need to be broken up. Sometimes they really are a unit)

--when you want to balance a long paragraph with a short one (always a good idea)

--when you have too many paragraphs in a row that are the same length (which gives the prose a monotonous feel. Same with sentence length) and want to combine some to break up the pattern (this can't be done randomly, though. You still want to have units of thought).

Probably there are other instances I haven't thought of, but that's the gist of it.

'New topic or new speaker - new paragraph' can help.

Blank spaces always aid reading - avoid solid page-filling blocks of narrative.

Your enthusiasm is commendable,Patty, but quick on-the-fly slapdash (and bad) rushed together snippets rarely make good examples for questions.

Why all the italics? If it's Third person Limited POV and I don't think any of them are needed. Unless the POV character is a mind-reader, any expressed thoughts can only be those of the POV character.

TellMeAStory said:

Patty,

What do you think of this? It satisfies BethS's first three rules, and it also my sense of what works.


The room was dark, and oppressive. She wondered if she'd be able to even find the door, without waking Benjamin. She crept, placing her feet slowly on the floor, and easing her weight onto each foot as she went. Creak The floorboards were wooden. Oh no! he's going to hear that. She held her breath, releasing it when Benjamin let out a soft snore. She crept onwards, Creak. She stopped, pulling her foot back.

Benjamin bolted upright. He automatically reached out to where she should have been with one hand, and grabbed his pistol with the other.

"Oh, Benjy. Sorry, I just needed a glass of water. I didn't mean to wake you."

Click to expand...

Locking this because it's getting too much like a crit.

Thanks all