A chapter break is a big pause: the book stops, a new page starts. A scene break is a small one — a jump in time, a change of place, a switch of point of view — inside a chapter, where a new page would be too much and a paragraph break too little.
It is the most common structural mark in a novel after the chapter, and the one most often lost, because the way people mark it in a manuscript is not the way a book shows it.
What it looks like in a printed book
Two conventions, and books use one or the other:
White space. An extra blank line between the two paragraphs, often with the first paragraph of the new scene unindented. Quiet, and the choice of most literary fiction.
A mark. A centred symbol on a line of its own. The traditional one is
three spaced asterisks — * * * — called a dinkus. Three asterisks in a
triangle (⁂) is an asterism. Small ornaments — a fleuron ❧, a short rule, a
tiny drawing — are the same thing dressed up, and genre fiction and books with
a strong design often use one that matches the cover.
The mark exists to solve a real problem with white space: a blank line at the bottom of a page is invisible. If the break falls exactly on a page turn, the reader turns the page and finds the next scene with no warning, and the jump reads as a mistake. Publishers that use white space handle this by putting a mark only on breaks that land at a page boundary, or by letting the typesetter nudge the page. Publishers that use a mark everywhere never have the problem.
What it looks like in an ebook
An ebook has no page bottoms, or rather it has a different one on every device and at every type size, so the blank-line convention fails constantly. A break that is white space in the file will land at the foot of some reader's screen, and vanish.
So an ebook should always use a visible mark. Kindle and EPUB both render a
centred line of text perfectly well; a centred * * * in a paragraph of its
own, or a horizontal-rule element styled to show a marker, is the standard
approach. Make sure the paragraph after the break has no first-line indent,
the same as the first paragraph of a chapter.
What it looks like in a manuscript
A manuscript is not a book, and the marks are different again. The convention
agents and editors expect — the one in the Shunn standard manuscript format —
is a single # on a line of its own, centred. Three asterisks are also
universally understood. What matters is that the mark is:
- on its own line, not tacked onto the end of a paragraph;
- the same every time — one symbol, throughout;
- not a blank line. A blank line in a double-spaced manuscript looks like a slightly larger gap, and an editor reading fast will not see it. The mark is for them, not for the reader.
Two blank lines is not a scene break. Neither is a page break. Neither is a row of dashes that Word has turned into a border.
The one rule
Whatever you use, use one thing. A manuscript with *** in chapter two, a
blank line in chapter five and ~ in chapter nine has three kinds of break,
and a formatter — human or software — has to guess whether they mean
different things. They never do.
What the formatter does with them
Our formatters read the manuscript looking for the scene-break conventions
above — ***, * * *, ###, ---, a lone centred symbol — and treat each
one as a break rather than as text. In the novel formatter
and the print formatter, a break becomes a centred marker
you can change, and the paragraph after it loses its indent. Because it is a
mark rather than white space, it cannot vanish at a page turn. In the
manuscript formatter it becomes the # the Shunn
format asks for. On Kindle it is a visible mark, because there it has to be.
A break the formatter missed is almost always one that was not marked — a
blank line, or a paragraph that simply starts somewhere else. Put a # there
and run it again.