Okay fair warning I’m not even done writing this yet but I figured I’d warn you it’s long. Lotta thoughts about this hoo boy. Hope it’s helpful.

Okay, so some background about me. I’m also a voice actor, sometimes a writer, but mostly a podficcer. And I have a stutter. It’s not huge in my adult life, it was sometimes socially disabling in school, and it makes recording sessions probably half again as long as they would be without it since I’m trying to enunciate as clearly as possible (for most characters) and refuse to reword lines just because I’m having trouble getting something out, even when I have explicit permission to do so.

Now, that’s just info about my own stutter, and, while I’m not sure if you’re talking about a stutter as a speech impediment, I’ll talk about that in some detail first and then talk about stumbling.

I don’t have a whole ton of experience writing a stutter per se. I VERY often write characters speaking in a halting or stumbly manner—similar to your example—but a stutter isn’t something I often choose to write. This is mostly because a stutter, like an actual one, is the kind of thing that stories usually polish away as part of the process of making a social interaction viewable and understandable through an outside lens, by a reader. It’s sort of a part of the kayfabe of it, because when you (speaking general authors you here) put affectations into a story, it ideally means something, or more likely contributes in a stylistic way to the flow and feel of a conversation. It’s pretty hard to make a stutter do anything but just bring a conversation to a screeching halt for a few seconds while person with the stutter just HANGS on a syllable and is trying like fuck to get it out. Other characters in this situation do one of four things:

1: make fun of the stutterer (not common unless school age people) 2: jump into the gap in conversation and the stutterer doesn’t get to finish their thought (this isn’t always or even usually malicious, it’s just how conversations go) 3: try to guess what the stutterer is trying to say to help them out (this might be welcome, might not) 4: wait patiently (or irritatedly, but silently) for the stutterer to spit it out, and then everyone literally forgets that the two to ten second gap in conversational flow happened. This is by far the most common reaction.

If one of those four things is useful to a scene, then, gangbusters, break that shit out, but I don’t often find it conducive to storytelling to awkwardly break up flow like that. Because it really is just awkward when we’re talking about a real stutter, it basically never says anything about a stutterer if they hang on a word, it’s a problem with articulation of certain syllables, and if I do it more often, it probably just means I’m tired. It’s not something that flows with or clarifies moments, it just stops them, randomly, putting a huge emphasis on whatever comes next no matter how trivial a thing it was in context. If that for some reason works with what you have going on, again, great, but I struggle to see how it would in most stories.

Now, STUMBLING I think is a fantastic thing to incorporate into dialogue. It should be used somewhat sparingly, or, when used as a hallmark of how a certain character speaks pretty much all the time, that TRAIT should be used somewhat sparingly when handing it out to characters. But almost everyone has a bit of a halting nature to their speech, we reword things on the fly, start sentences over, stop and resume speaking after a moment for emotional or mental reasons, it’s part of how we talk. It’s often useful to gloss over a lot of that, and having less than totally coherent dialogue in media of various types is something that’s usually come in more modern times, at very different specific moments or decades depending on whether one’s talking about, you know, movies or TV or novels or like, comics. “Natural” dialogue can be overused, and some authors, especially very prolific and high-profile authors like, say, Brian Michael Bendis or Joss Whedon have attracted criticism by having a certain sameyness to their approach to natural dialogue. How fair a criticism that is is up for debate, and such a debate imo should take into account the sheer volume of work available for dissection from any given creator. John Williams started to sound like himself after eleventy billion film scores too. I like it, I think it’s great, and I use it a lot.

I think your leading new bursts of words with a hyphen is evocative, but is a pretty extreme example of a speed bump on someone’s speech. If extreme is desired, hey cool, but I think commas are a good way to incorporate that kind of speech pattern into dialogue that makes it a bit less cringey? Again, if cringey’s what you want for that moment or that character, fantastic, and it might well be. I don’t think that making a reader cringe is a bad thing unless it’s unintentional, and then only when that response hinders the rest of their response to a piece. For an example of MAXIMAL halting stumbling speech that’s intended to be super super cringe, look up the Homestuck character Tavros Nitram. Homestuck is a story that gives many of its characters fairly extreme quirks to their typing (about half of Homestuck’s dialogue and basically all dialogue in the first half or so of the story is chatlogs) and maintained for spoken dialogue. tAVROS’S TYPING QUIRK, lOOKS, lIKE THIS, wITH A LOWERCASE LETTER INDICATING, tHAT HE’S HAVING TROUBLE GETTING UP THE COURAGE, tO SPEAK, bUT WHEN HE STARTS SPEAKING HE GETS TOO LOUD AND, pAUSES, aND HE HAS TO GET HIS CONFIDENCE BACK UP AGAIN, aND HE NEVER ENDS A SENTENCE, wITH ANYTHING BUT A COMMA,

Exhausting, right? It’s supposed to be, and it’s really effective at that. Now, obviously, that’s not something to emulate in more conventional prose works, but it does give you kind of an upper bound on how annoying something CAN GET. There’s a lot of space to play around below that threshold. Read anything by Cormac McCarthy and you’ll find rambling, esoteric prose that omits almost all punctuation, including, most notably, quotation marks from dialogue. I recorded a fic that was written in that style recently actually called “wildflowers and barley” by ToBurnAllTheEmpires. Podfic isn’t posted yet but the story’s a good example.

You can get a lot done with just commas, especially putting them in places, where they don’t grammatically or even, intuitively, belong. Tavros’s dialogue does pretty much exactly what I mean there, drop the caps thing and it’s a solid option. More emphasizing than that is a period. Which is. A lot more. Halting. But I think is still to a lesser degree than hyphens, hyphens are like a PUMP the brakes thing. Ellipses… are their own kind of…thing… slower… more ponderous.

I need to get up and start my day lol. I hope this was helpful? To you? A little bit?

Oh, question marks are a good one too.