Okay, this might be more of an English lesson than a rant, but here goes.

You're supposed to move to a new paragraph for one of the reasons: when there's a different idea (see how I moved to this one after the initial paragraph? Because the idea behind the paragraph changed), when a setting changes (correct me if I'm wrong on this), or when a new character starts speaking.

Now, that doesn't just mean a new character to the scene, it means one that wasn't speaking before. For example:

"Hey Jimmy," said Laura. Jimmy nodded at her, smiling.
"Hi Laura," he said, "how are you?"
"I'm fine, she said with a shrug.

That's a really simple example, but I'm not bothering to do complicated stuff here. The point is, when a new character begins to speak, or will begin to speak within the next couple of sentences, you move to a new paragraph. So many times I've seen stuff like this:

"Hey Jimmy," said Laura. Jimmy nodded at her, smiling. "Hi Laura," he said, "how are you?" "I'm fine," she said with a shrug.

And it's wrong! It's wrong and sloppy and it looks horrible. It bothers me to no end that writers don't bother following rules that they should have learned in their books. I don't care if you're going for long paragraphs because they look longer, it's wrong.

Published July 16, 2018