I love long paragraphs. I love getting lost in them. I love the investment. I love the payoff. I love the rhythm. I love that I remembered how to spell “rhythm” without having to look it up. That almost never happens. A lot of words don’t make a lot of sense in my brain and “rhythm” is usually at the top of the list. When I was a kid they taught you every paragraph was exactly four sentences long. No more. No less. If you broke this bizarre rule they’d mark points off your grade. Maybe not every teacher knows what the hell they’re talking about. Once, while attending English class in a drop-out adult high school, the teacher insisted on using the word “irregardless”, and I informed her it wasn’t a word. You looked at me like I was a piece of shit and told me that I was wrong. I corrected her again. It wasn’t a goddamn word. She said, “What do you know? You don’t know anything.” She told me she was the one with an English degree and she would know whether or not something was a word, and “irregardless” was definitely a word. “But it’s not!” I shouted, unable to shut up when it came to petty arguments. The rest of the class was ruined as we continued yelling at each other. I just googled “is irregardless a word” a second ago and apparently now it’s considered a word. Maybe it was always considered a word. Maybe I’m just a jackass. But still. I stick by my opinion that she was a terrible teacher who would have probably also told me every paragraph should be exactly four sentences long and I would have screamed until blood spilled from my mouth. Some authors never use long paragraphs. These authors are cowards. They think the key to writing suspense is short, one-sentence paragraphs, where every action deserves its own line. They confuse prose with screenwriting, which is something entirely different. A lot of writers are very bad at their jobs. You can tell by the size of their paragraphs. I want my paragraphs to last forever. I want them to blossom like lunatic flowers. I want readers to open one of my books and see the lack of paragraph breaks and think, “What the fuck am I looking at? I’m not reading this,” and then, maybe, they decide to try out a couple sentences, and suddenly they’re three pages in and the paragraph still hasn’t come to an end, and they sure as fuck can’t pause now, how would they ever remember where they stopped? Now they’re trapped. Now I have them. A long paragraph is magic. It is hypnotism. I love long paragraphs so much I would absolutely marry one if I could, but I don’t know how that would work. I love them so much that I’m afraid to end this blog post. This paragraph could be longer. It could always be longer. The trick is knowing the perfect place to stop. The trick is knowing the exact spot that will make the reader think, “Okay, I’ve about had enough of your bullshit.” That’s when you add in some quotation marks to fool them into thinking something exciting might be expressed through dialogue. I got you now, you son of a bitch.

I got you now.