Over this last little while, while editing my stories, I've noticed that I tend to write very short paragraphs, and that has given me cause to question whether or not I actually know what a paragraph is. Generally I just wing it. I have this idea in my head that a sentence is a complete thought that can exist on it's own, and a paragraph is a collection of thoughts that all work together to create a single concept, or in fiction, a separate scene, or scene element.
The thing is, paragraphs are all suppose to connect to make a story, and each paragraph is meant to be connected somehow by a thought, so it's difficult to judge sometimes where you should break your paragraph and begin the next.
I make those breaks whenever my narrative interrupts the flow of the story, or when my writing takes a time leap over a bit of uninteresting or irrelevant facts that would have no bearing on the story. And of course, I break for dialog, separating each person speaking. Often though, because of my self imposed rules, I end up with a lot of single sentence paragraphs, and I'm wondering if that is correct, and if I shouldn't try to flush out the thought more.
Can a single sentence be a paragraph? Does having too many short paragraphs in a story make that story seem choppy, and would my writing improve if I tried to flush out those short paragraphs more? I've been trying to find a more accurate description of what a paragraph is suppose to be, but so far, I haven't found anything in the books that I have or online. I remember seeing notes on stories or essays I wrote in school, where the teacher wrote something like, "this thought should be a separate paragraph", but how did the teacher know that herself? Do we all just wing it based on that simple rule that a paragraph is a self existing concept?
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