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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26473
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26473
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

My answer is a variation on my answer to the question you linked to: In prose, you cannot act out dialogue. Prose is recieved by the reader asynchronously. Things that take minutes can sometimes be read in seconds. Things that occur instantly or at the same time may take minutes to describe. Dialogue is not heard as it is spoken, with pauses and changes of pace and emphasis. It is read as prose, which it is.

It is only in very recent works that you find authors frequently trying to act out dialogue through punctuation or elaborate dialogue tags. I suspect it is movie influence. They are imagining who will play their characters in the movie version that will make them rich and they are trying to reproduce in print the way they imagine that actor delivering that line.

But this is not how authors have classically written dialogue. Instead, they have used entirely different devices to change the tone and emphasis of a speech to achieve the effect they want. They have added adjectives to add emphasis or changed word order to make the stress fall where they want it. They have use metaphor and symbol to evoke emotional responses. They have used alliteration and dissonance to emphasis particular ideas or passages.

It is well established that fictional dialogue is not real speech, and that real speech would be as difficult to read as fictional dialogue would be to speak in casual conversation. Movie dialogue is different as well (see Harrison Ford's well known complaints the George Lucas' dialog was impossible to deliver). Real speech on screen would be even more tedious than it is in real life. But movie dialog is not novel dialogue either, because it needs to leave space for the actor to act.

So, my answer is that you don't show hesitation. That you should not use hesitation as a device in dialogue at all -- or only very sparingly if you must -- but that you should recast you dialogue so that the emphasis you wish to create with the pause is created by some other means.

Original score: 3