When do you hit that return key, and why?
Here's a weird question: what is it, exactly, that paragraphs do in fiction? I ask because I just came across a theory that strikes me as intuitively right but hard to work out in detail. It appears in a book by Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17 (fascinating sixties sci-fi about the power of language, go read), where a character remarks, apropos of very little, that "the emotional unit in writing is the paragraph."
The emotional unit in writing? Hmmm. First of all, this put a picture in my head of paragraphs sulking in their rooms, wearing black nail polish and writing bad poetry about Life, while more sane units in writing, such as sentences and sections, try to ignore them and hope that they are just going through a phase.
Then I thought about this for a minute and suspected that Delany deserved to be taken more seriously. For one thing, he comments elsewhere that his character borrowed this idea from Gertrude Stein. Whether that makes the idea more attractive or less depends on your opinion of Stein, but since Delany fanboyed her, that tells me he probably meant to endorse what his character was saying. And his character modifies Stein's claim in a way that broadens it considerably. Stein said "the paragraph is the emotional unit of the English Language" (emphasis mine), but Delany makes his character (a poet who speaks and writes seven languages) talk not about one language but about writing generally. (Not speech; I'll get to that important distinction in a second.)
That's a big theory, and in a very cool essay Delany says a writer can best apply it in practice if, when she reads over her work, she
can forget the emotions that impelled the writing and respond to the modulations in the emotions the words on the page actually evoke.
Okay, important qualifier here: this isn't about the writer's emotions, but what the words on the page do to readers, and the fine art of anticipating that. This isn't a writing principle based on Being Emo -- just the opposite, in fact. Delaney is claiming that in order to write effective paragraphs, writers have to disassociate themselves from their own feelings -- it sounds kind of zen, doesn't it? -- and listen to the "modulations in the emotions" produced by the flow of their narrative, by the stream of experiences happening to their character.
And if the paragraph breaks happen in the right places? Then readers will be better attuned to these modulations too. It's as if readers get the opportunity to listen to the author read her story aloud (Delany doesn't say this, but I think it's a reasonable extension of his idea). The paragraph breaks are writing's substitute for the pauses for breath and changes in tone that would shape the narrative if the writer were in the room, reading to us. They're not just a mechanical convention of the written word; they're like the story's heartbeat.
It might help at this point to look at an example. In the columns below, I quote two short, non-spoilery paragraphs from a recent (and excellent) fanfic, first the way they were written by the supremely talented author, and then re-paragraphed to show (by comparison) just how splendid the author's original choices were, and how powerfully our understanding of the story is shaped by these choices.
From The Astronaut Phase, by pushdragon (HP, adult)
OriginalReparagraphed version
In the thrum of barroom noise so vague it was a kind of silence, with his sleeves soaking up the bartop moisture, Harry finally felt the day’s tension release its grip. Funny how chasing a vampire over the roof of St Mungo’s and throwing himself into thin air on the other side made all his senses sing in serene harmony, while the four days it had taken to write up the report afterwards left him cramped and snarling like a caged Horntail.
He nodded at Tess behind the bar, who measured out a double Firewhisky, and with another glance at his expression made it a triple. It must be an addiction. He’d no more than taken the glass from her when the alcohol seemed to seep between his vertebrae, dragging the tight muscles loose. He sighed.
In the thrum of barroom noise so vague it was a kind of silence, with his sleeves soaking up the bartop moisture, Harry finally felt the day’s tension release its grip.
Funny how chasing a vampire over the roof of St Mungo’s and throwing himself into thin air on the other side made all his senses sing in serene harmony, while the four days it had taken to write up the report afterwards left him cramped and snarling like a caged Horntail. He nodded at Tess behind the bar, who measured out a double Firewhisky, and with another glance at his expression made it a triple.
It must be an addiction. He’d no more than taken the glass from her when the alcohol seemed to seep between his vertebrae, dragging the tight muscles loose.
He sighed.
First of all it's obvious that the original has longer paragraphs. But the new breaks don't just produce more whitespace; they also, I think, change the feeling and to some extent the meaning of the passage.
In the original, the first paragraph nicely juxtaposes two slightly different emotional states: Harry's feeling of relaxation at the bar, and his memory of his frazzled workday. Though the paragraph begins with relaxation, we're left with that horntail -- and these ideas (relaxation AND dragon) belong together, in the original. Harry's mental state is balanced; he flows easily between these two modes.
The revision has a different effect because this stream of experience breaks up both more often and in different places. The original's smoothly unified experience (relaxing at the bar AND the memory of work) becomes fragmented. The horntail is buried in the middle of a paragraph. losing emphasis to the act of ordering a triple. This is a less stable Harry, I think; a Harry whose perceptions crystallize and shatter around alcohol.
This less stable Harry is not the Harry the author wanted to show. The original paragraph breaks are an important part of who Harry is in this fic. If the same series of actions were happening to a different character, they might be grouped differently: the grouping is part of the character's personality, of how the character is processing his experience on a moment-to-moment basis.
So, really, when should those breaks appear?
I guess the hard part of this comes in deciding just when a character's experience has become different enough to be marked as a significant end point or beginning point. Some paragraph breaks are driven by pure convention (a new character is speaking, for example; unless you're James Joyce, you'll break the paragraph there). Other potential reasons for breaking, though, demand of the writer a blend of respect for convention (many authors break paragraphs for a similar reason) and artistic judgment (paragraphs don't ALWAYS break for these reasons, so the author has to decide whether a break is really appropriate). Some examples, just off the top of my head:
1. Paragraph breaks can mark a POV character's shift in mood: her ex-husband is a feckless goofball, BUT [break] he certainly is good with the kids.
2. Paragraph breaks can draw attention to a moment when a character's spatial perspective changes significantly (she moves, turns her head, is thrown out of a bar, is launched into orbit, etc.)
3. They can mark a significant shift in the POV character's attention: from one object to another, from a memory to something directly in front of her, from worry about the future to brooding on the past.
4. They can mark a time shift in the narrative: we jump forward from nine in the morning on to five in the afternoon (wouldn't it be nice if we could do that in real life, too?).
5. In comedy, they can help an author build to, shape, and emphasize a punch line.
6. Breaks can emphasize that something unexpected has happened (a gun goes off, a new person enters the room, a cow falls on someone's head).
This isn't an exhaustive list -- there must be loads of reasons I haven't thought of. (If you write fiction, when do you break paragraphs? Enquiring minds want to know.) But regardless of how long the list might be, what interests me is that the things on it are not rules. They're principles that can guide but not determine an author's choices. None of them is in itself a sufficient reason to break a paragraph. A character's attention can shift, for example, much more often than the paragraphs break -- as it did in the pushdragon example.
The paragraph breaks sort the big shifts from the small ones, shaping a neutral report of events into an organic response to the way some character feels about these events. Only to a robot or to a computer is every moment equally important. For people, moments cluster into meaning, and paragraphing shows that clustering to readers. Paragraphing isn't about writing the perfect topic sentence (ugh!) or giving readers' eyes a rest: it's about establishing an emotional rhythm that turns time into experience.
The emotional unit in writing? Hmmm. First of all, this put a picture in my head of paragraphs sulking in their rooms, wearing black nail polish and writing bad poetry about Life, while more sane units in writing, such as sentences and sections, try to ignore them and hope that they are just going through a phase.
Then I thought about this for a minute and suspected that Delany deserved to be taken more seriously. For one thing, he comments elsewhere that his character borrowed this idea from Gertrude Stein. Whether that makes the idea more attractive or less depends on your opinion of Stein, but since Delany fanboyed her, that tells me he probably meant to endorse what his character was saying. And his character modifies Stein's claim in a way that broadens it considerably. Stein said "the paragraph is the emotional unit of the English Language" (emphasis mine), but Delany makes his character (a poet who speaks and writes seven languages) talk not about one language but about writing generally. (Not speech; I'll get to that important distinction in a second.)
That's a big theory, and in a very cool essay Delany says a writer can best apply it in practice if, when she reads over her work, she
can forget the emotions that impelled the writing and respond to the modulations in the emotions the words on the page actually evoke.
Okay, important qualifier here: this isn't about the writer's emotions, but what the words on the page do to readers, and the fine art of anticipating that. This isn't a writing principle based on Being Emo -- just the opposite, in fact. Delaney is claiming that in order to write effective paragraphs, writers have to disassociate themselves from their own feelings -- it sounds kind of zen, doesn't it? -- and listen to the "modulations in the emotions" produced by the flow of their narrative, by the stream of experiences happening to their character.
And if the paragraph breaks happen in the right places? Then readers will be better attuned to these modulations too. It's as if readers get the opportunity to listen to the author read her story aloud (Delany doesn't say this, but I think it's a reasonable extension of his idea). The paragraph breaks are writing's substitute for the pauses for breath and changes in tone that would shape the narrative if the writer were in the room, reading to us. They're not just a mechanical convention of the written word; they're like the story's heartbeat.
It might help at this point to look at an example. In the columns below, I quote two short, non-spoilery paragraphs from a recent (and excellent) fanfic, first the way they were written by the supremely talented author, and then re-paragraphed to show (by comparison) just how splendid the author's original choices were, and how powerfully our understanding of the story is shaped by these choices.
From The Astronaut Phase, by pushdragon (HP, adult)
OriginalReparagraphed version
In the thrum of barroom noise so vague it was a kind of silence, with his sleeves soaking up the bartop moisture, Harry finally felt the day’s tension release its grip. Funny how chasing a vampire over the roof of St Mungo’s and throwing himself into thin air on the other side made all his senses sing in serene harmony, while the four days it had taken to write up the report afterwards left him cramped and snarling like a caged Horntail.
He nodded at Tess behind the bar, who measured out a double Firewhisky, and with another glance at his expression made it a triple. It must be an addiction. He’d no more than taken the glass from her when the alcohol seemed to seep between his vertebrae, dragging the tight muscles loose. He sighed.
In the thrum of barroom noise so vague it was a kind of silence, with his sleeves soaking up the bartop moisture, Harry finally felt the day’s tension release its grip.
Funny how chasing a vampire over the roof of St Mungo’s and throwing himself into thin air on the other side made all his senses sing in serene harmony, while the four days it had taken to write up the report afterwards left him cramped and snarling like a caged Horntail. He nodded at Tess behind the bar, who measured out a double Firewhisky, and with another glance at his expression made it a triple.
It must be an addiction. He’d no more than taken the glass from her when the alcohol seemed to seep between his vertebrae, dragging the tight muscles loose.
He sighed.
First of all it's obvious that the original has longer paragraphs. But the new breaks don't just produce more whitespace; they also, I think, change the feeling and to some extent the meaning of the passage.
In the original, the first paragraph nicely juxtaposes two slightly different emotional states: Harry's feeling of relaxation at the bar, and his memory of his frazzled workday. Though the paragraph begins with relaxation, we're left with that horntail -- and these ideas (relaxation AND dragon) belong together, in the original. Harry's mental state is balanced; he flows easily between these two modes.
The revision has a different effect because this stream of experience breaks up both more often and in different places. The original's smoothly unified experience (relaxing at the bar AND the memory of work) becomes fragmented. The horntail is buried in the middle of a paragraph. losing emphasis to the act of ordering a triple. This is a less stable Harry, I think; a Harry whose perceptions crystallize and shatter around alcohol.
This less stable Harry is not the Harry the author wanted to show. The original paragraph breaks are an important part of who Harry is in this fic. If the same series of actions were happening to a different character, they might be grouped differently: the grouping is part of the character's personality, of how the character is processing his experience on a moment-to-moment basis.
So, really, when should those breaks appear?
I guess the hard part of this comes in deciding just when a character's experience has become different enough to be marked as a significant end point or beginning point. Some paragraph breaks are driven by pure convention (a new character is speaking, for example; unless you're James Joyce, you'll break the paragraph there). Other potential reasons for breaking, though, demand of the writer a blend of respect for convention (many authors break paragraphs for a similar reason) and artistic judgment (paragraphs don't ALWAYS break for these reasons, so the author has to decide whether a break is really appropriate). Some examples, just off the top of my head:
1. Paragraph breaks can mark a POV character's shift in mood: her ex-husband is a feckless goofball, BUT [break] he certainly is good with the kids.
2. Paragraph breaks can draw attention to a moment when a character's spatial perspective changes significantly (she moves, turns her head, is thrown out of a bar, is launched into orbit, etc.)
3. They can mark a significant shift in the POV character's attention: from one object to another, from a memory to something directly in front of her, from worry about the future to brooding on the past.
4. They can mark a time shift in the narrative: we jump forward from nine in the morning on to five in the afternoon (wouldn't it be nice if we could do that in real life, too?).
5. In comedy, they can help an author build to, shape, and emphasize a punch line.
6. Breaks can emphasize that something unexpected has happened (a gun goes off, a new person enters the room, a cow falls on someone's head).
This isn't an exhaustive list -- there must be loads of reasons I haven't thought of. (If you write fiction, when do you break paragraphs? Enquiring minds want to know.) But regardless of how long the list might be, what interests me is that the things on it are not rules. They're principles that can guide but not determine an author's choices. None of them is in itself a sufficient reason to break a paragraph. A character's attention can shift, for example, much more often than the paragraphs break -- as it did in the pushdragon example.
The paragraph breaks sort the big shifts from the small ones, shaping a neutral report of events into an organic response to the way some character feels about these events. Only to a robot or to a computer is every moment equally important. For people, moments cluster into meaning, and paragraphing shows that clustering to readers. Paragraphing isn't about writing the perfect topic sentence (ugh!) or giving readers' eyes a rest: it's about establishing an emotional rhythm that turns time into experience.