Inkless

Highlighting Paragraph Length

Many of the writing books I’ve read recommend varying paragraph size. The goal is to establish a natural rhythm and flow to sections of text—avoiding both lulling readers into a stupor with enormous blocks of text, or pummeling them with punchy one-sentence paragraphs.

Here’s how Self-Editing for Fiction Writers words its advice (in a chapter called “Breaking Up Is Easy to Do”):

So be on the lookout for paragraphs that run more than, say, a half-page in length. Whether it’s because readers feel lectured to, or because they feel crowded, or simply because some white space on the page is visually inviting, lengthy unbroken chunks of written material are off-putting… paragraphing more frequently can make your writing much more engaging.

And in contrast:

…a page-turner beginning to end is more likely to leave its readers feeling weary—and manipulated—than satisfied. When you want to create a more relaxed mood, or give your readers a chance to breathe (or reflect), or simply lull them into complacency before you spring something on them, try paragraphing a little less frequently than usual.

Sculpting your paragraphs for variety and rhythm can greatly help the flow of your prose.

Black Box Paragraphs

One easy way to study paragraphs as shapes is to select all of the text in the story (or in a portion if you’ve divided the story up to avoid word processor glitches) and then highlight it in black or dark gray. In addition to making your story look as though it’s been reviewed by the world’s strictest censor, this will provide you with black blocks instead of text, allowing you to focus your attention on the shape of the text without being distracted by the content.

To avoid having your notes also highlighted, consider using Microsoft Word comments instead of simply writing notes in the body of the text. When you’re done looking at paragraph size, you can simply select everything again and get rid of the highlighting, then go back and make any changes you left notes about.

Hopefully in the non-too-distant future, I will be able to make the time to create a simple macro that will allow you to search for paragraphs or sequences of paragraphs you feel may be too long or too short.

This is the fourth of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. Since it focuses on paragraph length, much of this section is devoted to the rhythm of writing: the painting of text against the white space of the page in a way that is visually appealing and understandable to readers. Since “natural” rhythm is such a big part of dialog (and since dialog conforms to different rules on the sentence, phrase, and word basis than much other writing), it will primarily be addressed here.