Is it a bad writing practice to end a paragraph with question?
I'm not sure where I picked up this habit. Here are two examples:
I pictured An-Mei’s slim fingers running across their smooth surface, her hand, and then the body connected to it. But try as I might, I couldn’t recall her face. All I saw were scattered facial features that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t put together; they were like jigsaw pieces that slipped from my hands the moment I grabbed them. Was time capable of erasing such memories?
The trail turned into a sharp curve, a mountain of fens blocking what lay ahead. I circled around it.
She was short and relatively thin. Her hair was cut at the forehead with two long strands hanging limply above her shoulders. She was wearing a red knit cap, a white cotton sweater, and a plaid skirt that reached just below her knees. On top of all that, she had a thick leather jacket. Comfortable clothes. Not the kind you’d bring to a hiking trip, though. What was she doing standing there?
Following her line of vision, I realized she was staring at a huge ancient tree.
I guess my intention was to use the question to connect the paragraph to the next one (or to give the paragraph a summary/ending). Does this feel amateurish? If so, what should I be doing instead?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/11111. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
When you have a question like that in narration, you are essentially narrating the protagonist's thoughts. If you put quotes around them, or italicized them, and made them present tense, they would be dialogue.
As long as you keep that in mind (and don't overuse the technique, as Watercleave correctly notes), it's perfectly fine to do.
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