Paragraphs

Paragraphs.

I like ’em. Big, meaty ones that wander and soar and beg a rereading.

But they are so out of fashion.

In a current “bestseller” by a lovely fiction writer, on a 32-line page with only two lines of dialog, in the year of our Lord 2024, I counted fifteen paragraphs.

Is our collective attention span so pathetic that this is necessary? What do editors (are they still a thing?) think about this? This is a “major” piece of “literary fiction,” I think (though I doubt my ability to define either of those terms), and it’s a fairly representative page. And I’m not talking James Ellroy thought bombs every six syllables. Just a lot of short paragraphs. I had to wonder, if the author saw no points worth expanding, why was I reading this? Payback for my once over-reliance on Cliffs Notes?

The micrograph is a unique and marketable skill, I reckon.

But.

Paragraphs.