: Re: How long should each paragraph be in fiction writing? In high school and even college most students are told to aim for around 5-6 sentences per paragraph. I am now trying to write fiction,

@Martha805

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Paragraphs should be as long as they want to be. That sounds useless, but it is really the best answer to your question.
The truth of the matter is, in prose writing, there are no hard and fast concrete rules you can apply. Everything is a matter of taste. That doesn't mean that it's the wild west and anything goes - there's writing that is awkward and stilted and unpleasant and that hits the wrong tone, and you want to avoid that. But you need to get used to looking at prose writing from a subjective point of view. Instead of measuring whether you hit the right concrete metrics, you need to think about what you want to achieve and whether the approach you're taking realizes your goals.
In the case of deciding how long paragraphs should be, you're looking at the ideas of sentence structure, pacing, and musicality. In prose writing, you want the way you arrange your words to read pleasantly off the page. For a fight scene, you might want a frantic pace. So short, choppy sentences arranged in short, 1-3 sentence paragraphs give your writing a breathless feel that propels the reader down the page. But when your characters have a chance to catch their breath and emotionally process everything that's happened to them, you probably want a more introspective pace. Long, flowing sentences arranged in dense paragraphs, full of questions asked to nobody and ideas that struggle to find something to connect with, make sense.
Every novel I've read has some paragraphs that are only a few words long, paragraphs that fill up most of a page, and everything in-between.
Don't feel like you have to make each paragraph fit within some kind of measuring stick in order to be Correct. Instead, think about what you're trying to say at each point in your story. Let your paragraphs tell you how long they need to be. Make them musical, and allow them to break up ideas naturally instead of forcibly separating or conjoining ideas that shouldn't be pulled apart or crammed together.

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