Day 142: Paragraphs

I've been thinking a lot about paragraphs lately. They seem to be one of the more misunderstood structural elements in writing, probably because they're so highly variable, yet also exacting. They're the piece that makes me work the hardest to get the flow right. Compared to the other elements in writing, I find them extremely finicky. Sentences, for example, can only be so long or short. You rarely ever see sentences that are shorter than five words, or longer than a few lines, and so the structure usually remains pretty consistent. The ones that do bend that structure tend to stand out, and it's usually obvious why they needed to. Chapters too, are usually pretty easy to figure out because they're harder to mess up. Some writers like to have perfectly even chapters, others like to have an ebb and flow in chapter length, but most just do whatever feels right. Whatever you do works if you're consistent. Easy enough. I'm not sure such a simple mentality can be used for paragraphs. They aren't as cut and dry as sentences, but they can't be played with as much as a chapter. They're also extremely important to structure properly, being the element that makes or breaks the flow of the page. I've developed a personal strategy for dealing with paragraphs that works well for me, and I'd like to share it here. In the future I'm sure I'll look back and see if it still works for me. Maybe you can get some use out of this strategy as well.

If you read the dictionary definition of a paragraph, you'll get something like this:

'A distinct section of a piece of writing, usually dealing with a single theme.'

That's good and all, but what is a theme? Well duh, you might think, the topic of a piece of writing. For example, the theme of this blog post is paragraphs. But each paragraph in the post talks about paragraphs, so how could each 'theme' be distinct from the next? What makes a theme distinct anyway? And shouldn't adjacent paragraphs be related in order for the whole thing to flow naturally? And so doesn't that mean that in reality paragraphs' themes won't actually be so distinct? So how does the writer determine when to make a new one if paragraphs are not-so-distinctly distinct individual themes that are different but also all relate to the overarching theme?

Do you see why this topic gives me a headache yet?

Like many dictionary definitions, it is technically correct, but also rather worthless to someone trying to figure out how to make one. I find it much more effective to think of paragraphs like this:

A paragraph is a tool to encapsulate a thought.

That might seem only trivially different from the definition above, but it lets me make further analogies that I find useful. 'Theme' is a tricky word to wrap my head around, but 'thought' is an intuitive format that I find much easier to work with. If a paragraph is supposed to be individual thought, then a series of paragraphs is a train of thought. That makes paragraphs the cars in the train. Each sentence is a feature of the individual car it belongs to, and can best relate to the adjacent cars if they connect at either end. The whole train could be a scene, or a chapter if you prefer. Again, I find this much easier to grasp than thinking of writing as a series of connected topics. They're similar in principle, but the difference lies in the flow between thoughts. Distinct themes may or may not flow together well together, even if you come up with all of them in sequence. Thoughts on the other hand always relate to each other one way or another, and bringing out those relationships is much easier than relating themes that you started out thinking of as 'distinct' to begin with.

The analogy also allows me to judge the usefulness paragraphs much more effectively than if I simply thought of them as distinct sections of writing. The cars are connected, and rely on one another to form the train. Some less important cars can be removed, and if you couple the cars back together, it'll still make a complete train. Other cars, like the engine at the front, are crucial, and cannot be removed. Identifying important and unimportant paragraphs is much easier this way. (Try skipping over this paragraph and see if the post still reads well. Does it? Then the thought is both well encapsulated, and it is a less important car. I saw the thought as necessary to convey, but the rest of the post may not need it at all.)

So what makes an individual car of this hypothetical train though? It's still the same problem of individual themes, isn't it? I personally don't think so. I can identify my own individual thoughts much more effectively than I can invent a distinct theme. The answer is right there in the previous sentence. Invent a distinct theme. Thoughts occur. Themes are invented. We don't think in themes, we think in thoughts that flow, and themes don't necessarily flow well. I can't give you much advice on identifying individual thoughts about a topic, since that is completely up to the writer's thought process, but I can always tell when a writer's thought process doesn't line up with the structure of their paragraphs. The flow becomes distorted when a writer uses paragraphs for purposes other than dividing their thoughts.

I often see people use paragraph breaks to draw emphasis to certain line.

Like this. The only issue with this practice is that it can reduce the impact of the adjacent paragraph by instead transferring the power to the emphasized line. The single sentence paragraph above is obviously not a complete thought when compared to this paragraph. This one expands heavily on the first thought, so it's questionable as to whether it should be its own paragraph. That's ok when thoughts are only tenuously connected, like this one I used earlier: 'Do you see why this topic gives me a headache yet?' Or if there is an extremely important line you want to draw attention to like the next one-liner I used in this post.

But if I do this too often it starts to get weird.

And slow.

And annoying.

It looks like I'm just trying to make every single line as important as the next. Intuitively, we all know this doesn't make any sense. Nobody speaks in constant one-liners. We speak in thoughts and expressions, encapsulating our ideas into strings of sentences, which is exactly how I like to think of paragraphs. You don't think about the theme of what you're saying while you're saying it, but any good speaker can take a pause when they feel it right to do so. Those pauses usually come at the end of an important thought. If the whole thought is a one-liner, so be it. But far too often I see a bunch of one-liners that are all the same thought, split up for no reason other than the writer believed the thought was so massively important that they absolutely must force the reader to ingest it a certain way. I find it annoying in more ways than one. Breaking up the paragraph like the example above turns all of the connected paragraphs into a bunch of fragmented thoughts like a shattered mosaic. I'm not saying that's always a bad thing. Maybe a character is actually having a bunch of shattered thoughts. Again, if that's how the thoughts are, then so be it. Emphasizing importance alone is not a good enough reason to structure paragraphs that way in my opinion though. Using the tool unintentionally is the real problem. Breaking up paragraphs because you think a certain line needs more emphasis without considering the cost inherent will turn a manuscript into a total mess, and worse, make it look like you're a one trick pony with only one good way to make a line stand out. Don't do that. There are so many other good ways to draw the reader's attention.

Another advantage of this pattern of thought is that it lets me get into a good flow almost instantaneously. Once a thought occurs, it's pretty easy to get to the next one. And the next one. And the next. The difference here is that if you have a certain specific theme you want to cover, everything you say has to relate somehow, and it can be hard to do that consciously. I prefer to push that work to my subconscious instead, letting ideas flow naturally, even if they're seemingly disconnected while they occur. Coming up with a sentence that relates to a theme is very difficult if you're constantly judging how well it relates. Instead, let the thought flow like a river, and if it bends around a rock, that's ok. It'll eventually come back to the point.

I could probably go on for days about how paragraphs are best used like thoughts, but I'm already 45 minutes overtime and I need to save some words for my actual novel. Please remember these are all my opinions, and if you disagree, well then I hate you. No, just kidding of course. If you like your paragraphs

like this, then please carry on. If themes are easier to write in than thoughts, or you see no real difference and you think I'm an idiot, that's fine too. But if you do like this method, I'm glad to have imparted some useful knowledge.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley