How to Write an Interruption in Dialogue
by Mary Kole | Former literary agent, now a freelance editor, writing teacher, and IP/story developer for major publishers and creators.
This is a quick article about how to write an interruption in dialogue formatting, as well as how to show a character trailing off in dialogue writing. There are strict industry standards about dialogue formatting in the publishing business, and for good reason. While you might see some variations occasionally, it’s more or less a rule that most published books follow. If you learn how to write an interruption and format your dialogue in your manuscript, you will be that much closer to presenting a polished file to agents and publishers.
Dialogue Formatting Considerations
I'm not a fan of excessive dialogue tags, too much motion, improper formatting, and needless replacements of "said" with other fancy variations of words or adverbs. But these are beyond the scope of this article. The good news is, how to write an interruption in dialogue is—at least—very easy to implement or fix in revision. You can learn this skill once and then move on.
If you’re wondering how to write an interruption, having to describe what’s happening tends to come off as overbearing. For example:
Sally began to say, “Dammit, Barbara, you always cut me off before I can finish.”
But Barbara was quick to interrupt her. “That’s because there’s nothing to say. What you’ve done is so …” But she trailed off before she could think of something to say.
This is arduous and unnecessary. Quite simply, this is overwriting. And all of the extra narration can be replaced by formatting. With a few simple pieces of punctuation, we can quickly and easily help dialogue flow more quickly and easily, without any overt explanation.
How to Write an Interruption? Use An Em-Dash! And Trailing Off? An Ellipsis!
The em-dash is the perfect tool for conveying interrupted dialogue. To create one, use two hyphens and most word processing programs will do the rest. The most common consideration after that is whether or not to use spaces on either side. We prefer no spaces.
Use an ellipsis to indicate a trailing off of thought or speech. To make one, type three periods with a space before and sometimes a space after, depending on whether or not the sentence ends there. If it does, add a period after the ellipsis. If you're using it in dialogue, place your end quotes. If there’s a pause within a sentence … like this, use spaces on either side.
How to Write an Interruption: An Example
“You always cut me off before I can finish—”
“That’s because there’s nothing to say. What you’ve done is so … so …”
You can take out the "Sally began to say" bit and the "Barbara interrupted her" and “Barbara trailed off” part, because it's all shown in the punctuation rules for dialogue. Quick and easy!
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