Can someone give me some pointers or websites on how to correctly set apart paragraphs in a manuscript?

This may help. Pax - C.

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing...

Subject matter. When a subject changes, either because it is finished or one wishes to pass into a new level of detail or explanation, start a new paragraph.

Each paragraph should be a "whole thought". That is not to say it must be "every thought on the subject", but that it should be complete in itself, and not confused with thoughts of equal priority or weight.

How one differentiates between thoughts is indeed the key question: how do you? One might expect a natural sense of "break" or "shift", but some people just ramble on and on and on. An instructive exercise might be to free-associate, and find your own sense of "volume", so that boundaries become clarified, and the "need to shift" (in order to express the truth of one's mental organisation) becomes instinctive.

Which, ultimately, is what it is: paragraphs are not absolutley defined, they are there to enhance clarity of understanding. In part that will depend on the audience. Where some cannot handle more than three lines in a row without wanderring off, others can read seven solid pages of text and handle the conceptual seperations mentally themselves.

As an author, preliminary paragraphs may emerge in larger blocks than in final drafts: if one can summarise the subject of a paragraph in one phrase, then elaborate on it without expanding beyond that phrase's implications, one is doing well so far as one's own understanding goes. How well one will do for other's is something of an executive (or 'authoritative') decision.

Concision in general is welcomed these days.

Oh: and characters' speaking need not entail paragraph breaks. One can embody several lines of conversation in one paragraph if one chooses (and it may be clearer for the reader if one does so: for example, a long conversation covering a few topics might better be treated not as dialogue in a film script but as a dialectic rendered in speech).