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A New Paragraph, from The Birth of a Story, by William Sansom (1972)

A manuscript page from William Sansom’s story “No Smoking on the Apron”

A new paragraph, a white breath for the eyes, is becoming more and more a necessity nowadays, with the accelerated pace of things in general and I would say certainly with readers reluctant to face too large a block of words with no relieving white space. Look at a page of Simenon, an economical writer with a fast narrative pace, and see how extremely short his paragraphs are, how seductive the whitened pages.

from The Birth of a Story, by William Sansom
London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1972

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