The long dash used to create emphasis, insert extra information, or signal an interruption in thought or dialogue.
The em dash is a punctuation mark the width of the letter M, written as a long horizontal line. It's the most versatile punctuation mark in a fiction writer's toolkit - it can replace commas, parentheses, or colons depending on the effect you want. Where commas create gentle pauses and parentheses whisper asides, the em dash demands attention. It says: stop, this matters.
Learning to use the em dash well gives you a new gear in your prose. It lets you interrupt a character mid-sentence, insert a crucial aside without breaking your sentence's flow, or create a dramatic pause that's stronger than a comma but less final than a period. It's one of the few punctuation marks that can genuinely change how a sentence feels.
Dickinson used dashes as her primary punctuation, creating a breathless, halting rhythm that became her signature style. Her dashes do the work that commas, periods, and line breaks do for other writers.
Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style relies heavily on dashes to capture the way thoughts interrupt, layer, and redirect themselves in real time.
Egan uses dashes to create a conversational, intimate tone in her narration, letting asides and interruptions mirror the way we actually tell stories aloud.
If you have more than two or three em dashes per page, you're probably overusing them. Each one should earn its place. Try replacing some with commas or restructuring the sentence.
Hyphens (-) join words. En dashes are mid-length and show ranges (pages 10-20). Em dashes are the long ones for emphasis and interruption. They're different tools for different jobs.
Sometimes the most dramatic thing you can do is end the sentence. A dash keeps the reader inside the same thought. A period forces a full stop. Choose based on the effect you want.
Pick a style and stick with it. Most fiction uses em dashes with no spaces on either side. Some publications use spaces. Either works, but be consistent throughout your manuscript.
Take a paragraph from your current project and rewrite it three ways: once using em dashes for parenthetical asides, once using them for dramatic emphasis, and once with no em dashes at all (using commas, periods, and parentheses instead). Compare the three versions. Notice how the em dash version feels different in tone and rhythm.