How do scene breaks and ornaments work?
A scene break is the gap inside a chapter where one passage stops and another begins. In a printed book it is set deliberately, and the formatter gives you two ways to get one.
Mark them in your manuscript
Put a simple centered mark on its own line where each break falls — * * * or # is plenty. Don't try to make it look finished in Word; you're telling the formatter where the break is, not what it should look like.
A run of blank lines can also be read as a break, but it's ambiguous — a manuscript that uses blank lines for ordinary spacing will confuse the issue. An explicit mark is always safer. See How should I prepare my DOCX?
Choose how they print
In the formatter's settings, Scene-break mark decides what actually appears on the page:
- Blank line — the quietest, and the most common in literary fiction.
- *` `** — the traditional typographer's asterism.
• • •— a slightly softer version of the same idea.—— a single centered dash.
The blank-line problem, and the fix
A blank line is invisible when it lands at the very top or the very bottom of a page — the reader sees a page break, not a scene break, and reads straight through a change of place or time.
That's what Mark breaks that fall at a page edge is for. It's on by default, and it prints a small mark on exactly those breaks that would otherwise disappear. It only appears when you've chosen the blank-line style, because the other three are already visible wherever they land.
Your own ornament artwork
If you have a drawn ornament — a mark made for your book — put the image into the DOCX at each scene break, alone in its own paragraph, with no caption. The formatter recognizes a small, uncaptioned picture between two passages as a separator rather than a figure, and gives it the treatment a scene break needs:
- It can never sit at the foot of a page. An ornament at the bottom of a page means "this passage ends here" with nothing under it, and the reader turns the page to find out what it was separating. A separator always keeps at least one line of text beneath it, moving to the next page if it has to.
- It gets air above and below it — a line of space on each side, supplied by the typesetter rather than baked into your image. That space is elastic: near the foot of a page it closes up rather than pushing the whole ornament overleaf and leaving a short page behind.
Keep the artwork at its natural size and don't add blank padding around it in an image editor. Padded artwork is rigid — it can't compress when a page is tight, and it costs you page after page that ends short of the bottom.
A picture that is captioned, tall, or close to full measure is treated as a figure instead, and a figure at the foot of a page is perfectly ordinary. See How are pictures in my manuscript handled?
In the EPUB
Ornaments carry into the ebook as real images, sized so they scale with the reader's text size. If you gave the picture a description in Word, that becomes its alt text — which is how an ebook can distinguish one kind of break from another for a screen reader.