How do we handle pauses in a dialogue?

All of these answers are correct. I think this is a more technical way to look at it, which may give you some better direction:

All of dialogue has a rhythm, and people reading the dialogue will infer the rhythm from what is on the page. If this were music, the pauses would be demarcated by rests between notes, and they indicate a certain length. In language, the word choice and phrasing have their own rhythm. Longer syllables are slower; short indicative or imperative sentences without filler can be snappier, and they all take some amount of time. Think about the characters' speech as the music notes, and the pauses as the rests, and make the dialogue tags or descriptive actions between lines of dialogue take the same time to read as you want the pause to last.

Those pauses are sometimes called beats, as in this article (which is about writing interesting ones):

How to amp up the dialogue with emotional beats

posted almost 5 years ago

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wordsworth‭

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You indicate pauses with action, even mentioning the pause. (Or, as Cyn says in comment, with other exposition or thoughts).

Chad said, "Was the computer software hacked?"

Bryce shook his head. "No, it was a bug caused by legacy software. Any other question?"

Bryce waited for somebody to answer, but everyone averted their eyes, or looked at the wall clock.

"No? Okay, see you on Thursday."

Noise filled the room as students gathered their books and belongings, and began to wander into the hall. He waited for Alice to pass, his star pupil. She caught his eye.

She said, "Bye."

Bryce smiled and nodded to her.

posted almost 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Amadeus‭

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