Dash it all...

Recently I was re-reading a novel called To Die in Italbar by one of my favourite SF authors, the late, great Roger Zelazny.

There are many reasons I love Zelazny's work, and I'll talk more about this another time. Today I wanted to highlight a relatively minor aspect of his technique but (in my view) an interesting one for writers. It's the way Zelazny uses dashes to indicate a sudden change of direction in mid-speech. Here are a couple of examples from the book above, though I appreciate that taken out of context they may not make much sense:

"You're sure you won't take my money?"
"No, thanks. - May I go to the upper deck again after lunch, to see the volcano?"

And...

"There was no record of him with us either, though. - Look at that flare-up, will you?"

I've seen this device used by other writers as well, but re-reading Zelazny's book recently reminded me of it. I'm not saying it's an essential technique for writers, but used appropriately, and in moderation, it can help make your dialogue sound more life-like.

Of course, dashes are useful punctuation marks for other purposes as well. In pairs they can be used parenthetically, as an alternative to commas or brackets.

Here's an example - not an especially inspired one - of the parenthetical use of pairs of dashes.

There are no hard and fast rules about this, but I feel that dashes used in this way give more emphasis to the parenthesized material than commas or brackets would. They make it stand out that bit more.

Dashes are also handy if you want to show a sentence that suddenly goes off in a surprising or unexpected direction...

I bought a new car at the weekend - then abruptly wished I hadn't.

This is somewhat similar to the usage by Zelazny that I started off discussing here, of course.

One other very important use for dashes is to indicate a sentence that is interrupted or broken off abruptly...

"I need to ask you a -"
"- Favour? Forget it!"

By contrast, ending a speech with an ellipsis indicates that it simply trails away.

"That might be the place we are looking for, but then again..."

Incidentally, one question I'm often asked about dashes is how to present them on the page. My advice is to choose a convention you are happy with, and stick to it. Americans in particular often use two hyphens side by side to indicate a dash, or you can of course use the dashes produced by default in Microsoft Word when you type a spaced hyphen. But don't get hung up about en rules, em rules and such like - these are matters for editors and typesetters to concern themselves with, not authors. Indeed, at least one publisher's house style guide I have seen asks writers to represent all dashes with hyphens, and leave it to their editors to convert them to en rules or whatever.

Finally, much as I like dashes, it's important not to over-use them, or your writing will end up looking like 'notes'. Stick to using them for the specific purposes I have set out here, and you shouldn't go too far wrong. - Happy writing!

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