"Empty-space" vs "three-dot" scene break
What's the difference between the two? I've seen both in the same book. For example in the Bone Clocks by David Mitchell:
Space breaks:
He’s clever, I realize. First he makes you grateful. Right. Of course. I do believe it’s time I was off.
DANDELIONS AND THISTLES grow along the cracked track and the hedges are taller than me.
And look what a fool she made of me, when my turn came to be Amanda Kidd–ed. Doesn’t Stella need friends? Or for Stella, are friends just a way to get what you want?
ON MY LEFT’S a steep embankment, with a dual carriageway running along the top, and on my right a field’s been cleared for a massive housing estate by the look of it.
Three-dot breaks:
“What’s that s’posed to bloody mean?” Brubeck lets it drop. So I let it drop too.
• • •
THE CHURCH IS quiet as the grave. Brubeck’s asleep in a nest of dusty cushions.
“Not calling me ‘sweetheart’ would be a good start.” I don’t hide my laugh. The guy stares daggers at me.
• • •
LESS THAN A hundred yards later this knackered Ford Escort van pulls over. It might’ve been orange once, or perhaps that’s just rust.
Is the • • • a bigger scene break than then spaced one? When to use the former and when to use the later?
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To the best of my knowledge, there is no widely-accepted rule of when asterisks are appropriate versus when extra white space is appropriate versus other possible conventions.
To my mind, and for what it's worth, a row of asterisks indicates a bigger break than a blank line.
One catch to white space: It can get lost when a document is reformatted. Like, I just finished converting a book I wrote from print format to Kindle. It's non-fiction, but I used white space to indicate a break in the chain of thought at a number of points. Except ... on some Kindle devices, the blank space is displayed as I wrote it. On other Kindle devices, they put blank space between ALL paragraphs, and no extra space where I had these breaks, so the distinction is lost. It wasn't a real big deal so I just didn't worry about it, but in other contexts I can see it becoming confusing. A reader might think this is a continuation of the previous scene when it's really a new scene, and be several paragraphs in before realizing, "Wait, they're not still at Bob's house, and how did Sally get here? And, oh, wait, somewhere in there the scene moved to Sally's office. Where was that?" etc.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/17172. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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There's no universal standard for this, or at least not in fiction. Books generally pick one style and stick with it. Larger narrative breaks than a section break can be indicated by starting a new chapter.
The exception is in printed books that use extra space between paragraphs to designate the end of a section, and when this happens at the end of a page: In this circumstance, the book will often use a row of asterisks or other symbols instead of empty space, for clarity's sake.
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