Please note that things get particularly weird when people confuse line breaks and paragraph breaks.
In your word processor, whether google docs or anything else, if you hold shift while you hit the enter key, you get a line break. This puts you on the next line but does not put a space between the paragraphs. Useful for poetry or lyrics, LOUSY for easy formatting of text.
If you simply hit enter but don't hold the shift button at the same time, you get a paragraph break.
Now, some sites will automatically turn line breaks into paragraph breaks, and some sites will not. Sometimes you get line breaks in notes sections being converted to paragraph breaks while line breaks in the story are not.
Sometimes to compensate, people will use two line breaks in place of one paragraph break. This is a Bad Habit to get into.
AO3 naturally puts a space after every paragraph break in the body of a story. It does not do that after line breaks. This is normal and expected behavior, because there is a style convention for online materials to have space between paragraphs (AND NO INDENTED FIRST LINE) because things are easiest to read that way, and online, page real estate isn't an issue.
In print, to distinguish between paragraphs, there are NOT generally extra spaces between them in prose, just indented first lines. This saves paper and preserves readability. You DO need to indent first lines when you are laying out large blocks of text for print. But extra spacing should be preserved for scene breaks, for example.
IF you get in the habit of using paragraph breaks in your word processor, and only one per paragraph, it will help in two ways.
- AO3 will correctly insert a small space between each paragraph.
- You won't accidentally double-space your stuff and end up with giant gaps.
- If someone makes a printed book out of something you write, it will save them hassles in the layout stage because we can tell a word processor or layout program or website to handle text differently without needing the body of the text to change to get the end result we want.
I set up a blank doc years ago for my own use formatted roughly the way AO3 does things, fonts, line spacing, style settings, all of it, and then set that as my google docs default. Which gets me a lot closer to 'what you see is what you get' (wysiwyg, pronounced whizzy-wig) and a lot less likely to reflexively double paragraph. Now if I hit a paragraph and it's not properly spaced, wherever I am, I go check my settings.
The exception is facebook, where often hitting enter will post and using double line breaks is the only way to do multiple paragraphs reasonably, because facebook.
