Making Transitions Using One-Sentence Paragraphs: A Reverie

It has been so long since I updated Bloggie.

It has been so very long.

I moved my desk. And it’s incredible to me—simply astounding—what a difference it can make in the life of a man, or of anyone, really, to move a piece of furniture five feet, and turn it so that it’s facing a different wall from before. It’s such a small thing, but it makes me feel like I am The Mutable Man, like all it takes for me to turn my whole self around is to face a new direction when I’m sitting in my basement.

What does it mean?

Does it mean I’m a stupid man who is easily manipulated?

Yes. It does.

I used to hate one-sentence paragraphs. I thought they were the worst things in the world.

I thought they were a means for manipulating a reader. I thought they were nothing more than a transparent way for writers to make mundane things seem profound. Put a dumb statement in a one-sentence paragraph, and voila—as they say on the French TV show Call My Agent—you’ve got a thing that’s profound.

For example.

I like jelly.

I like jelly so much I slather it on sausages.

I don’t chew the sausages.

They slide right down.

The jelly tastes sweet.

Do you see what I mean? People do this kind of stuff all the time.

Well. Guess what. Now I do it all the time.

I can’t even help myself. The short stories I write, now, are made up largely of paragraphs that don’t last beyond a single line.

And while I worry, on the one hand, that I have lost my way somewhere—that I must be well into my decline, as a writer and as a human being—on the other hand, I’ve found that one-sentence paragraphs can be a useful tool.

One of the projects I’m working on—and I’ve got too many projects! it’s seriously bad for my mental health!—is a nonfiction book about a rating system for books I invented. It’s out of control. But I’m experimenting with making transitions between sections within chapters using not rigid section breaks, like a line of asterisks that break chapters apart and make them more readable, but using instead one-sentence paragraphs. Or, anyway, short paragraphs.

I don’t know if it’s working, but it’s what I’m doing—using a series of one-sentence paragraphs as a means for smoothly changing the subject.

I don’t want to use abrupt section breaks anymore.

I feel as if I have moved on from them.

A series of one-sentence paragraphs do the same work of graphically representing a transition.

And on the other side of a brief stretch of OSPs, I can do whatever I want.

I can tell you about how my cat, Leona, is always nearby when I’m writing. She’s practically my writing partner. She gets up on the desk and meows at me, or she sits nearby, looking out for me. She even stands watch when I go into the bathroom.

Anyway. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.