Em-Dashes: Arrows to the Heart

Like many people, I first encountered dialogue set off with em-dashes (sometimes called quotation dashes) by reading James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” I was a teenager at the time, and impressionable. Certainly, this way of styling dialogue was new to me, but I never had any issues knowing who was talking in this format.  It may or may not be wise to let teenagers read Joyce, but for me the damage was done; my sense of how consciousness could appear in prose had been given a blast with a blowtorch.

Joyce didn’t invent em-dash dialogue styling—it was already being used in continental literature, particularly French—but he brought it into the mainstream of English literature.  With it came Joyce’s intense interior access, and the exciting sense of flow that he and other modernists achieved.

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When, as an adult, I began to work on the material that formed my first two novels (“Wilberforce” in 2015 and “Grievous” in 2019), I found myself presenting the dialogue with em-dashes. The few times I experimented with switching back to quotes, I felt dizzied by the clutter on the page. Once I got into the habit of cutting into speech with em-dashes, quotation marks had come to look very busy. As well, both of my novels are set between the wars at a fictional boys’ boarding school in England, a time and place linked in my mind to the worlds of Joyce and other em-dashers. When I made the decision to stick with this dialogue style, however, my em-dash radar had widened beyond Joyce to other, later, British and American examples such as Roddy Doyle’s “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha” and Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain.”

The em-dashes convey a sense of speed and pace better than quotation marks, especially when there is interruption.

Previously on Grammar Girl, Christopher Yates wrote a fantastic, wide-ranging essay about different dialogue styles, including his favorite, bare dialogue (a la Cormac McCarthy), in which dialogue is presented as just another paragraph with no styling whatsoever. In contrast to the “bare” style, em-dash dialogue feels louder because the speech is set off from the prose with that sharp little line. It can even start to resemble playwriting, especially with extended stretches sans dialogue tags, almost as if you’re reading a script with some stage directions tossed in. The em-dashes convey a sense of speed and pace better than quotation marks, especially when there is interruption.

Take this passage from “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in which young Stephen Dedalus has returned from a meeting with his school’s headmaster:

The fellows had seen him running. They closed around him in a ring, pushing one against another to hear.

• Tell us! Tell us!
• What did he say?
• Did you go in?
• What did he say?
• Tell us! Tell us!
• He told them what he had said and what the rector had said and, when he had told them, all the fellows flung their caps spinning up into the air and cried:
• Hurroo!

The anonymous voices surround Stephen, and we feel as though we are in the middle of that ring with him. Stephen’s actual lines are given in indirect speech (he told them what he had said) because Stephen’s focus at this moment is not what he himself is saying, but what the other boys are doing and saying, particularly the unfamiliar experience for Stephen of being sought-after and cheered.

The em-dash provides an interplay between private thought and public speech, particularly when a character is carrying on a conversation but thinking something different at the same time.

Perhaps of greatest interest to me, the em-dash provides an interplay between private thought and public speech, particularly when a character is carrying on a conversation but thinking something different at the same time. In my novels, everything is narrated in close third person, so the reader has access to the point-of-view character’s sensory, mental, emotional, and imaginative experience. The em-dashes slice through the barriers between interior and exterior, immersing you in that thought/speech multitasking.

When the interlocutors are at cross-purposes—which is really fun to write—it can be hilarious, or painful, or both, watching your guy say and think one thing while the other person seems to be carrying on an entirely different conversation. But that is how life works, isn’t it? How often do we think we understand what the other person is saying, only to find out later that one or both of us got the wrong end of the stick?

Em-dashes can take some getting used to, but once your eye starts scanning them, it is easier to enter into the scene and into a character’s consciousness without the cluttered, controlling reportage of narration with quotation marks. Those little slashes, the width of the letter m, can shoot you right into to the heart of the matter.

Have fun!

H.S. Cross is the author of “Wilberforce” and, most recently, “Grievous” (FSG, April 2019).