A Funny Little Thing…

I would like you to look at the page structure of a fantasy novel below.

An early segment from Clash of Kings

We have a familiarity with how it sits on the page. We are accustomed to a certain number of paragraphs per page, the size of the paragraphs, and the look of them. We know what feels right for the genre we read.

But how things look on a page impacts how we write on that page. I noticed that since almost every submission on earth wants Shunn formatting, I have started to write in Shunn formatting. However, when I write in Shunn formatting, my paragraphs get much shorter because the spacing between lines gets bigger, and I was artificially truncating the paragraphs to make them look right on my page!

When I switched back to writing in standard default Times with single spacing, my paragraphs naturally got longer. How bizarre! Is either one right? No. I say this brief snippet to say: pay attention to the little things that impact how you write and the structures you put on the page. You might be influenced by the smallest stuff you otherwise would never have noticed.