A scene break marks a shift inside a chapter — a jump in time, place, or point of view that's too small to justify a new chapter but too big to run on as if nothing changed. You write one by ending the scene on a clean beat, inserting a break marker, and opening the next scene with enough grounding that the reader knows where and when they've landed. The marker is usually a centered row of three asterisks or simply extra vertical space.
That's the mechanic. The two questions that actually trip authors up are when a break should be a scene break versus a chapter, and how to mark it so it survives the trip into a finished ebook and print book — because the most common choice, a plain blank line, can quietly disappear in both. We'll cover both, plus the small craft moves that make a break read as deliberate instead of accidental.
When to use a scene break instead of a chapter
A scene break and a chapter break do different jobs, and using the wrong one disorients readers in ways they can't always name.
Use a scene break for a shift that keeps the chapter's momentum but moves the camera. The standard triggers: a jump forward in time within the same thread, a cut to a different location, a switch to another character's point of view, or a move to a new beat after the current scene has clearly ended. The connective tissue you'd otherwise have to write — the drive across town, the three hours of waiting — gets skipped, and the break tells the reader you skipped it on purpose.
Use a chapter break for a larger structural unit: a major shift in time or stakes, a deliberate cliffhanger, or simply the rhythm of how you're pacing the book. Chapters are containers; scene breaks are cuts inside them.
The practical test: if the reader needs to stop, reset, and absorb a big change, that's a chapter. If you just need to skip the boring part and keep going, that's a scene break. When a chapter accumulates five or six scene breaks, that's often a sign the material wants to be split into separate chapters — or that some of those cuts aren't earning their place.
How to signal the shift in the writing
The marker is only half the job. The prose on either side has to do the rest, because a symbol tells the reader that something changed, not what.
Close the scene on a beat. Don't break mid-thought or mid-tension unless you're deliberately cutting away for suspense. A scene break lands best after a small sense of completion — a line that closes the moment.
Re-ground fast on the other side. The first paragraph after a break is doing orientation work whether you want it to or not. Name the new time, place, or viewpoint character early — ideally in the first sentence or two. "Three days later, the office smelled of burnt coffee" does in eight words what a confused reader would otherwise spend a paragraph trying to reconstruct. The most common scene-break failure isn't the marker; it's making the reader wait too long to learn where they are.
Watch POV handoffs especially. If the break also switches viewpoint, establish the new head quickly and unmistakably. Readers will assume they're still with the previous character until you tell them otherwise, and every sentence they spend misattributed is a sentence you'll have to win back.
What marker should you actually use?
Here's where craft meets formatting, and where a lot of otherwise-clean manuscripts go wrong.
The centered row of three asterisks — * * * — is the safe, conventional choice. Its standard form is a line of three asterisks centered on the page. It has a name worth knowing: a dinkus. In typography, a dinkus is a device that typically consists of three spaced asterisks or bullets in a horizontal row, denoting a break in a written work. You'll also see the term asterism for the same idea, but strictly the asterism is the triangular arrangement of three asterisks (⁂), and that usage is now nearly obsolete — most "asterisms" people mean today are really dinkuses. A third option, the fleuron (❧), is a decorative leaf or flower glyph used the same way.
Your real choices come down to three:
- A dinkus (
* * *or***), centered. Portable, unambiguous, renders reliably everywhere. The default for good reason. - A blank line / extra vertical space, no symbol. Clean and unobtrusive — still the predominant method in many published works — but it carries a real risk covered below.
- An ornament or fleuron. Handsome in print, but if it's an image file it can look wrong in an e-reader's dark or sepia mode, so use it carefully.
Why a blank line can vanish (and what to do about it)
This is the part that surprises people, and it's the strongest reason to mark breaks with a symbol rather than relying on space.
A blank line works as a scene break only when it falls in the middle of a page where the reader can see the gap. If a blank-line break happens to land at the top or bottom of a page, it becomes invisible — the page edge eats the white space and the reader has no idea a scene changed. In print, you don't control where the page breaks fall, so you can't predict which of your invisible breaks will land in a danger zone.
Ebooks make it worse. In an EPUB you can never be sure where on the page a break will fall, because readers use devices with different screen sizes, so a blank-line break can land at a screen edge on any reader's device. There's a deeper technical trap too: what we see as blank lines, software sees as empty paragraphs, and EPUB export routinely strips paragraphs that contain only spaces — so a break built purely from whitespace can disappear entirely on conversion.
The fix is simple and worth adopting as a permanent habit: always mark scene breaks with an actual symbol in your manuscript, even if you ultimately want the clean blank-space look in the final print layout. A real dinkus gives you three things a blank line can't — it survives format conversion, it stays visible at page and screen edges, and it gives you something searchable so you can find every break later. If you want the understated blank-space look in print, you (or your formatter) can strip the visible symbol from mid-page breaks at the final layout stage. Going the other direction — adding breaks back after they've silently vanished — is how you end up with a reader emailing to ask why two unrelated scenes ran together.
Setting it up cleanly across formats
A few practical habits keep scene breaks from becoming a formatting headache later:
Use one consistent marker throughout the manuscript. Pick your dinkus and use the exact same characters every time. Consistency is what lets a formatting tool find and style every break at once instead of you hunting them down by eye.
Don't build breaks out of manual blank lines or tabs. Empty paragraphs and stray spaces are exactly what gets mangled in conversion. A single styled marker line is cleaner and more durable.
Style the marker, don't just type it. In a proper layout, the dinkus is centered with controlled space above and below — not just three asterisks jammed against the surrounding paragraphs. How you achieve that depends on your tool, but the principle holds across all of them: the break should be a defined element, not an accident of spacing. Most book-formatting tools, Pendrilo included, treat the scene break as a styled element you set once and apply everywhere, which is what keeps it consistent between your EPUB and print PDF.
The short version
A scene break is for shifts too small for a chapter: a time jump, a location change, a POV switch. Close the old scene on a beat, re-ground the reader fast on the other side, and mark every break with a real symbol — a centered dinkus — rather than a bare blank line that can vanish at a page or screen edge. Do that consistently and your breaks will read as deliberate cuts, survive the trip into EPUB and print intact, and never strand a reader wondering what just happened.
