Writing Tutorial: Ode to the SECTION BREAK
Learn how to move through time and space and even hop bodies with the touch of a (return) button. It's like magic.
When I learned how to use section breaks, it transformed my writing.
Prior to this, my chapters were one long swath of ongoing text, dialogue, information. I remember being exasperated while on the phone with my first fiction editor at FSG (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Frances Foster. Frances was one of the grande dames of publishing and the editor of my first three novels. So much of who I am as a writer today, I learned from working with Frances.
“Sometimes it just seems impossible to get somebody down the street,” I told her that day as we talked. “And how in the world do you get your character to the next day, or even worse, the next week?” I felt like I was going out of my mind, giving the reader a play-by-play of my protagonist’s every move, and having to account for every minute of her existence.
Frances laughed at my exaggerated despair. Then she talked to me of what I now think of as the powerfully magical Section Break, and the kind of transitional phrases that can help you (in memoir) or your characters (in fiction) get from one place to the next, one day to the next, or even from summer to winter and so on. All with a few keystrokes and maybe a decorative symbol to mark it, like an asterisk. Or perhaps a chapter break (which is technically also just another type of section break).
Reasons for a Section Break
Section breaks can (and should) be used in any kind of writing—from academic nonfiction to fiction to memoir to short stories and essays. Once I learned to use them I never stopped. They are not only useful but integral to the pacing in my writing. Here are some of the things that section breaks allow a writer to do, along with some examples from my own books.
