Technical Topics -- Paragraphing

I got asked about paragraphing down in the comment trail.  This is one of those topics a bit beyond my skill to talk about, but I will attempt it.

The problem with paragraphing is that it's nine-tenth easy routine. Obvious routine. But then the last tenth of paragraphing is magical handwaving and art.

Easy stuff first.



-- We paragraph to get white space.

It's just plain hard to read a block of solid text.

 I speak for all those who have weak eyes and wear glasses and get eyestrain after an hour crawling the page.
Give us unbroken runs of words and we can't see the trees for the forest.
Give us white space and we squint-eyes will plant fig trees in your honor in high fields where the hours are suns, endless and singing . . .

which last bit is not my words btw, but a bit of quote grabbed from Stephen Spender, just in case you did not happen to know.  He's here.  Isn't that a cool poem?



-- Paragraphs pace.

The reader speeds through text with lots of white space, slows down on encountering a solid block. So the same number of words in a thick block of text is perceived as both harder to read and paced slower.

Want to slow the action? Hey -- Toss in a solid block of text.



-- Paragraphs sort dialog.

And this is one of their major functions.  As a general rule, each speaker gets his own paragraph.

This convention is so clever and simple. Somebody thought this up.  Or maybe it comes to us from drama.  Brilliant innovation, in any case.

Anyhow, this convention lets us tag dialog. A 'dialog tag' is a saidism or action or any of five or seven other shifts and cantrips that identify who is saying those words of dialog.

Break the paragraph, and the reader is expecting a change in who's talking. Her eyes zip down and instinctively grab the 'speaker' out of the text surrounding the line of dialog. She goes looking for the dialog tag even before she mentally reads the words of the dialog. That's why the reader can 'hear' the voice of the character speaking that dialog right off.

At least, that's the ideal.

That's why you tag early in the paragraph, not late. So the reader doesn't have to go back and 'rehear' the spoken words in the right voice when she finally figures out who's doing the talking.

The best tag, of course, is an obvious back-and-forth between speakers, where the reader doesn't have to do any work to 'hear' the right voice.
We cannot, unfortunately, always isolate two speakers in a room and let them chat.

What happens when we don't have paragraphs?
Lookit this mess.

Or, rather, look and don't try to read it.  Just skip down to where I do the same words and paragraph.  Think of this block of unbroken text as a cat fight in a washing machine and move on.


Myrtle sorted skulls, not by size, but by region of origin. "You'll be safe enough with Gregory. He's in a good mood. Anyway, he doesn't kill people I've told him to protect." The skulls rolled in doddering circles on the smooth table. "Gregory is wholly admirable. For a vampyre. He is, however, an uncomfortable companion." An absent-minded nod. "There are worse monsters wandering the campus at night. Shall I send Davin to tuck you in?" Twenty shook her head. "There is no need." The smell of elder blossoms was heavy on the air that came in through the wide window at the end of the lab. The McFeeney Science Building was surrounded by a delicate battalion of elder and ash trees. There were magical defenses as well. The students didn't notice. Didn't see. Twenty did, which was why she was in danger. Great danger. "Davin isn't welcome in my bedroom. Tell him." A skull from Ethiopia nudged into a skull from the southern Arabian peninsula. "Tell him yourself." She turned and he was there.  Davin.  Dark separated from shadows.  "That's Professor Fosset, I think. The skull you're holding."

Not only is this unreadable in a single block, it's also confusing as hell when you do read it, which I hope you have not bothered to do.

So we make paragraphs.

Myrtle sorted skulls, not by size, but by region of origin. "You'll be safe enough with Gregory. He's in a good mood. Anyway, he doesn't kill people I've told him to protect." The skulls rolled in doddering circles on the smooth table.

"Gregory is wholly admirable. For a vampyre. He is, however, an uncomfortable companion."

An absent-minded nod. "There are worse monsters wandering the campus at night. Shall I send Davin to tuck you in?"

Twenty shook her head. "There is no need."

The smell of elder blossoms was heavy on the air that came in through the wide window at the end of the lab. The McFeeney Science Building was surrounded by a delicate battalion of elder and ash trees. There were magical defenses as well. The students didn't notice. Didn't see.

Twenty did, which was why she was in danger. Great danger. "Davin isn't welcome in my bedroom. Tell him."

A skull from Ethiopia nudged into a skull from the southern Arabian peninsula. "Tell him yourself."

She turned and he was there. Davin..

Dark separated from shadows. "That's Professor Fosset, I think. The skull you're holding."

 
Aren't you glad that's in paragraphs?  Though I imagine you could do without the Italics, all in all.

But see how the dialog is assigned now, clean and clear, without spending an extra word to do it.


Because no rules are absolute, we sometimes use a single paragraph to hold dialog from two characters.
In this case we must tag carefully.
Although it's not as if we could ever be weird and careless and frolicksome with tagging.

"I don't trust you." Twenty tried to pull away, even as Davin replied, "You don't have any choice."

I kinda like such constructions. Jennifer Crusie does this fairly often.


-- Paragraphs assign action and description to characters.

In one of those writing-rule serendipities that are so pleasing to my sense of order,  actions, descriptions, internals, perceptions and so on that are in a paragraph, snuggled up next to identifiable dialog, belong to the speaker of the dialog.

The action or description or saidism identifies the speaker. 
When we know the speaker,
the dialog attributes action and description and internals and whatall that falls in the same paragraph.

Symbiotic, y'know. Writing as an ecosystem.

I am not going to natter on at greater length, because I'm supposed to be writing rather than disporting myself in the blog.
But I am not finished.
There will be a next posting with more about paragraphs.