How to Make Your Stories Interesting from the Perspective of a Reader 101

Chapter 2.5 - Paragraph Breaks

In my last chapter, I showed you guys the beautiful wonders of paragraph breaks and how they make your writing so much easier to read, but I didn't show you how you're supposed to add it into your own writing. Now if you already took 3rd grade English, then you probably won't have to read this, but if you just want a refresher then go ahead and continue.

One thing I see a lot in low quality fanfics is where there will be paragraph breaks, but not as many as there should be. For example, once I saw a fanfic that was at least 600 words long and only about 7 paragraph breaks were there. My immediate reaction was to exit the book and continue to look for a different book, and we really don't want that for your own literary masterpieces (if you can call shitty wattpad fanfics that).

The way to avoid this is to know when to add a paragraph break into your writing. This, of course, you can Google on your own, but since you probably don't want to, I'll lay it out for you. The main way you can tell when to add a paragraph break is when a new topic pops up. For example, the character will be describing the beauty of a room, but all of a sudden they character goes into sudden detail of a particular object. At that point you should add a break there, seeing as this is focusing on this object and not the room anymore.

He stayed there, looking around the posh bedroom absolutely enhanced by it's beauty. The silk curtains that hung over a small window allowed sunlight to ride its way into the room, almost giving it a ethereal glow. It was beautiful, was the only thing that he could think of at the moment.

His eyes glanced over at the small desk that was centered under the window. It held many small nicknacks and plants. The desk was clattered with them, sprawling about the desk in a chaotic manner. He slowly wondered if the person who owned this bedroom was as chaotic as their desk was. The thought made him chuckle.

Now of course, since I find that the internet can be filled with idiots, some people do the exact opposite of not adding enough paragraph breaks. I've even seen some where people make into one sentence per paragraph. In order to counter this, you shouldn't always do it per item. Let's say a person is describing someone's clothes. You wouldn't add a paragraph break for every clothing item that you listed, it would make it weird. You should sort of sort every sentence in a category instead. Since were talking about appearances here, you would add everything about the person's appearance in one paragraph.

Now some people like to categorize it into more smaller things, which in my opinion is the best way to do it. For example maybe a paragraph describing the main clothes on the persons body. Then after they would add a paragraph just with the look of the persons eyes and hair. It's really up to you how you do it, but make sure to always keep to the rule of at least having 2 sentences per paragraph.

Now really I could go on about this subject for days, but I feel as if I've said enough for right now. If I feel like I left something out, which I probably will seeing as I've read a lot of shitty fanfics, I'll make a part 3 explaining something else. Won't that be fun!

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Do you guys see anything I missed or didn't go into enough detail about? Go ahead and ask me if you do. I'm a English nerd and am very willing to answer your questions.