I wrote a short story consisting entirely of dialogue once.  For 
shorter pauses, commas work well, even if they aren't grammatically 
correct.  Elipses are good for longer pauses.  A set of quotes with nothing 
in it, or just an ellipse ("" or ". . .") is good to indicate where one 
person stopped speaking and the other didn't say anything.  Two of those 
can indicate that both people were silent for a while.

         More generally, it's good to have only two people involved in any 
conversation, and they always alternate speaking, even if one person only 
says ". . .".  Address people by name when the speaker or the listener is 
unclear; in a chat between Hitomi and Van, if the person is addressing 
Hitomi, then the speaker must be Van.  Keep each bit of dialogue short, 
don't give speeches.  You'll avoid having to deal with a second paragraph 
of speech by the same person, and most of the tension and drive in your 
story will be the interaction of people, so you want to keep them 
interacting.  Finally, you can set apart individual conversations with a 
scene break.  Remember that you still need to include relevant information 
about what people are doing, where they are, and how they look, without it 
being obvious that you're just adding it to the dialogue so the reader can 
know it.

         I hope this helps.  I can't say my 'fic was particularly well 
written, although (I hope) that had more to do with trying to cram it into 
such a small story than anything else.  I also didn't set out to make it 
all dialogue; I just ended up feeling, midway through, that the dialogue 
tags and scene descriptions weren't adding anything to the story.  Part of 
that, of course, comes from the nature of fanfiction, where you assume the 
audience already knows what the setting and characters normally look like.


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embracing, bowing to the dark; for when they idealize half the world they
must devalue the rest.
                            -Miriam Simos


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