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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/17172
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 1