Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
And, in theory, if the preceding paragraph is JUST long enough, in either instance, with a flush-left para at the top of the following page, it's remotely possible that the reader mightn't know that they were in a new scene.
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Someone might think it was the same paragraph, continuing from the previous page? That would be remote indeed, and I doubt it would apply to any experienced reader. (And what other kind of reader would a writer want?)
Just as poets have this mad notion that they should DESIGN the page in addition to writing the poem, writers think they should use weird fonts for some obscure reasons of their own. (I did this too, in my second novel. I insisted, wept, pounded the table, and finally got Doubleday to use a font that I liked, because it had a pleasant italic, and I had used a lot of italics. Now I can't even remember what the font was! The book has been published many times since, in British and Dutch and paperback and digital editions, and of course nobody (including me in recent years) has ever paid the slightest attention to my chosen font.
So it is with prose. The reader can figure it out. Readers aren't stupid, or they wouldn't be reading our books. That was true in 1965 when that novel was published, and it's even truer today, when the stupid people are all watching streaming video.