: I certainly like Lauren's answer, among others. But nobody has spoken specifically to dialogue, so I thought I'd add a bit to that. With narration, I don't like to add pauses in general,

@Reiling826

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I certainly like Lauren's answer, among others. But nobody has spoken specifically to dialogue, so I thought I'd add a bit to that.

With narration, I don't like to add pauses in general, but a first-person story would be different, I suppose. With dialogue, you want the reader to read with the same rhythm, if not the same pace, as the way your writer's mind sees it happening in order keep the reader maximally enthralled.

Pauses in conversation can be solved by using a dialogue tag where you want the pause

"Johnny!" Billy hollered, "your ma says you gotta come home!"

"And I was doing the same thing over and over and over again," Bob said, taking a drag off his cigarette, "and I was, like, What's going on?"

"As it turns out," Henry said, "the wind was coming from the east!"

Another option is to use a filler like hmm, uh huh, ,well, and so on.

"We were, you know, happy to see each other, but ..." Marie trailed off. "Eventually we just had to accept reality."

"It's going to be, well, a tough victory, but maybe--just maybe--if we're really lucky..."

Sky said, "This is great, hmm, pasta. It's pasta, right?"

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