The rhythm of action and character is controlled by the rhythm of your sentences. Which led me to Ronald Tobias’s “The Elements of Fiction Writing: Theme & Strategy,” Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic where to break lines, where to end sentences. One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of material: how to structure it, what sort of sentences (direct, elliptical, simple or compound, syntactically elaborate), what tone (in art, “tone” is everything), pacing. Or was it? Was hitting the ENTER key actually a conscious choice? I dug deeper and found Joyce Carol Oates: I didn’t realize that his idea that each paragraph of a story was a camera shot had been the basis of my own writing for decades. All of my short stories can be shot right off the page. By the way the paragraph reads, you know whether it’s a close-up or a long shot…I may be the most cinematic novelist in the country today. Here is what he said in his essay “Shooting Haiku in a Barrel.” But I sorta remembered he mighta maybe said something about paragraphs. I had lost his book Zen In the Art of Writing years ago, maybe had lent it to someone. It wasn’t until I got home from the conference that I remembered Ray Bradbury. More word gumbo about gotta have rhythm and there were no rules… I weaseled my way through the answer, saying that it was a feeling of sorts, that you just had to trust your instincts, find your style. In years of teaching writing workshops and doing too many critiques to count, I had never really thought about that. “How long should my paragraphs be?” she asked. “All my stories are cinematic…every paragraph is a shot.” - Ray Bradbury
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