When Do I Hit Enter?

A post about paragraphs and pacing

I swear that earlier in the week I had a better intro to this post…

See, I’d seen a post on social media in which an author had linked to a news article in which a different popular author was advocating for writers to use shorter paragraphs in order to appeal to the shorter attention spans we all have these days. The first author’s commentary on this opinion was, to paraphrase excessively: you can pry my long paragraphs from my cold dead hands.

Subsequently, however, I have been unable to find any evidence of either the social media post nor the news article it referenced, which rather undercuts everything. The ephemera of the internet? Fever dream? Spurious straw man argument? I am forced to let you decide.

But anyway, it made me think about paragraphs, and writing one of these a week means that if I have an idea, it’s getting written about. So, let’s get stuck in.

Personally, I tend to paragraph pretty frequently (as will be evidenced in this post). Partly, I think that’s because of the content write. I tend to have an underlying thriller model to a lot of what I write. Everything is plot driven. Everything is moving forward. We’re not stopping anywhere for too long to look around. We’ve got to keep moving. We’ve got to get to the next paragraph, and keep the tension high.

To take a writer that you can DEFINITELY compare with me without batting an eyelid… (erm)… Charles Dickens famously employed rather long paragraphs. I don’t know if you know this about Mr Dickens, but he was not writing fiction based on contemporary thrillers. Shocking but true.

Dickens is a very atmospheric writer. He’ll sit in a moment and let you feel it. He’ll take the time to build the scene around you. The world around the character is critical in much of his fiction, and so each paragraph dwells in that world, in its sights and sounds, and what they signify.

One of my good friends and favorite writers is Paul Jessup. If you haven’t read his work, you really should. We’ve known each other for almost two decades now. We read each other’s work a lot and talk about writing a bunch. A lot of these posts come out of conversations Paul and I have had over the years.

Anyway, one of the many reason’s Paul work is worth checking out is that you’ll actually see a bunch of different paragraph lengths. When the action is flying along the paragraphs come fast and hard. When he wants to show you something wild—and you will see some wild shit reading Paul’s work—he’ll dump you in that moment and not let you look away. And it even varies by book. Something more atmospheric like The Silence that Binds has longer paragraphs overall than something more propulsive like Cancer Eats the Heart.

So, yeah, paragraphing is a pacing technique. Hell, even in this non-fiction post it’s one of the reasons I’m paragraphing fairly frequently. I want to keep things moving, keep things light, keep things fun. I don’t want anyone to get bogged down. (Also, the imagery in a post about writing is likely to be pretty weak, so… what do we want to hang around for anyway?)

But the tradeoff with short paragraphs can be a loss of depth. Because a paragraph essentially serves as a container for a thought or topic. The end of a paragraph indicates that thought is over. That’s one of the reason short paragraphs works as a pacing technique. If you just keep rolling on the same topic, regardless of your paragraph break then that paragraph break doesn’t belong there. You’ve betrayed the purpose of the break, you monster.

But also, some of paragraphing is just personal choice. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, there are no hard and fast rules with writing. There are just effects. The pacing thing is just an effect. And there are ways of counterbalancing the slowing effect of long paragraphs. There are plenty of other ways of controlling pacing. Sentence length, word choice, just the content of the paragraph itself.

I’m sure one of the reasons I paragraph frequently is because of my dayjob. As a copywriter part of my role is to be as efficient with language as possible. The less I’m on the page, the more people appreciate it. After 20 years of that, I think there’s probably been some knock-on effects.

But that does bring us somewhat full circle. Because the reason I have to be efficient with language at work—the reason brevity is championed at ad agencies—is because we are writing things we very much want people to read. So that means lowering the barriers to reading that thing as much as possible. I’ve talked elsewhere about how in advertising we keep the language we use as simple as possible. Minimalism is another trick to helps folk read things. And that’s exactly what the unnamed author from the dubious opening of this post is talking about when he talks about using short paragraphs to appeal to people with short attention spans. He’s talking about lowering the bar to entry. He’s talking making sure his work is read.

(I feel like it was Ian McEwan who was referenced as saying this, but I seriously can find no evidence of this…)

And what about the response to this suggestion—which, as I recall, had a sense of “I’m not dumbing down my writing for people, they can come up and meet me here”? Is that reasonable?

In a word: yes.

Look writing is personal. It’s a writer pulling out something from inside them and shaping it for public display. Those choices are theirs and theirs alone. If they want to write long paragraphs, more power to them. Does that choice come with consequences and tradeoffs? Of course it does. But so does the opposing choice. Art is, at some level, just a series of choices. When we find a writer or artist we like, a lot of what we’re liking is the choices their making.

This post isn’t advocating for one position or another when it comes to paragraphs. None of what passes for writing advice on this site is ever going to really come down on one side of an argument or another. It’s just exploring the consequences of choices, in the hopes that it helps someone make a choice more thoughtfully. Or it helps someone come back to a choice they made unconsciously during the creative process, and understand it more fully.

Now, get out there and choose to have fun.