Dinkus

A dinkus is a typographic marker — most commonly three spaced asterisks (* * *) centered on their own line — that signals a scene break within a chapter. It tells the reader that time has jumped, the location has changed, or the point of view has shifted, without starting a new chapter.

Print tradition offers several variants: three asterisks, a short centered rule, or a small ornament called a fleuron. Ebooks make an explicit marker more important, not less — a blank line alone can disappear at a page boundary on an e-reader, leaving the reader with no visible cue that the scene changed. A dinkus survives reflowing text where white space does not.

The working convention in manuscripts is to type the marker as an asterisk, space, asterisk, space, asterisk on its own line; designers may later swap it for an ornament in print. Scribegrove stores scene breaks as a centered * * * dinkus in the manuscript, and its editing tools treat everything between two dinkuses as one scene.