#fallofmagic

The Spirit River

In my opinion, just a sprinkling of stuttering in dialogue is enough to get the point across. Overdoing it can make the dialogue difficult to read or even get annoying to readers, and even if a character is struggling to speak, your reader shouldn’t have to strfr uggle to read. So, you probably don’t want to have it in every single sentence your character utters.

I usually show it with just a hyphen (-), but as for the exact typography of it, your editor will make that decision. If you self publish, it’s up to you!

“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What’s the w-weather like out there?”

And, of course, there might be some variation in the stuttering. You can add in more when it’s a high-tension situation, if your character is saying something difficult (like confessing love, saying that a family member died, etc), when your character is excited about something, and if your character is with unfamiliar people. The stuttering might not be so severe around close friends/family.

If you establish that your character has a stutter early, then you don’t need to keep hitting your reader over the head with that fact. You can even outright say it with the occasional dialogue tag (he stammered, he stuttered), or have another character mention it.

It may not be as true to real life, but “real” dialogue just doesn’t always work in a novel. In the writing certificate class I’m taking right now, we just had an assignment to record a conversation at a coffee shop or something, and then write a word-for-word transcript of it.

In real life, people talk so strangely. They add in a lot of “ums” and “likes” and the conversation goes in random directions. They interrupt each other and talk over each other and switch subjects mid-sentence. It pays to take *some* advice from how real people talk, but following it 100% just wouldn’t work for most novels.

Here’s a great article I found with more advice (link). I especially liked this section:

You don’t have to write: I-I-I I I I’m S-s-s-sorry –because that’s ridiculous. Even if that’s how someone sounds in real life, it looks crazy in writing. You can write something like “I-I’m sorry.” Your readers will still get the point and they’ll know your character has a stutter.

Hope this helps!