16 January 2012

Paragraphing

Remember back in school when your English teacher taught you how to form a paragraph? You have a topic sentence, two to three supporting sentences, and then a segue sentence into the next paragraph. Maybe you have noticed that it doesn't exactly work the same way when writing a story. There are a few easy tips to separating blocks of text into paragraphs.

First is dialog. When a new person speaks it is a new paragraph. This one is fairly straightforward and most people catch on to it really quickly.

When working with large chunks of prose imagine yourself as a camera man. Every time you change camera angles you need a new paragraph. If you action from two characters and then talk about another character who isn't with the other two then you need a new paragraph. This isn't a catch all rule, and authors have creative license when it comes to deciding how you want the prose to look.

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