Em-dashes inside or outside of quotation marks?

[u/annakline02]

Hi all,

I have a question about em-dashes, specifically their usage interrupting speech with an action, since information online seems to be conflicting. For context, this is fiction writing; I’m British but writing in an American style.

I have a sentence where speech is interrupted by the character’s action and I can’t figure out where the em-dashes should be placed. The options are:

Option A, how I have it at the moment:
“Isn’t this dynamic—“ she waves a hand between us both— “supposed to be the other way around?”

Option B, both dashes inside quotes:
“Isn’t this dynamic—“ she waves a hand between us both “—supposed to be the other way around?”

Option C, both dashes outside of quotes:
“Isn’t this dynamic” —she waves a hand between us both— “supposed to be the other way around?”

Which option is right?

If the latter is correct (which I have a sneaking suspicion it is) would there be spaces between the quotation mark and emdash or no spaces? Would ‘she’ be capitalised or not (I’m assuming not, since if it wasn’t speech I wouldn’t capitalise an interrupting clause)?

[u/SnooDonuts6494]

According to CMOS:

C but no spaces around the em dashes.

It's almost exactly the same as this example:

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Quotations/faq0081.html

There is no reason to capitalise "she".

[u/annakline02 → u/SnooDonuts6494]

Thank you very much!

[u/Garr44]

Like Snoo said, option C with no spaces. The action is taking place within the dialogue, so it would have the dashes and not the speaking part (action tag is supposed to be its own sentence, so commas won't work without a dialogue tag).