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The inputManager is one of the best-kept secrets of TADS 3. It provides (arguably) more usable alternatives to some of the input methods listed in the "tads-io" function set.
This tads-io function set includes functions like morePrompt, which displays a MORE prompt and waits for the player to press a key; inputKey, which waits for the player to press a key and returns the key pressed, and inputLine, which reads a whole line of text from the player (up to the point the player presses the ENTER or RETURN key) and then returns the string entered.
The trouble is, as you soon discover, that these functions don't entirely work as you want them to. The problem typically is that you place, say. morePrompt in a the middle of some text to create a dramatic pause, but what actually happens is that you see all the text, and only then the more prompt. E.g. you write code like:

| "The evil baby-eating villain points his splat-gun at you, pulls the trigger and...";

| morePrompt();

| "... suffers a sudden fatal heart attack! ";

But find the more prompt is actually displayed after the second line of text, defeating your dramatic pause.
One way to deal with this is to toggle the transcript off and on:
gTranscript.deactivate();

| "The evil baby-eating villain points his splat-gun at you, pulls the trigger and...";

| morePrompt();

| "... suffers a sudden fatal heart attack! ";

gTranscript.activate();
But this is a little awkward. The simpler way, would be to use an inputManager method:

"The evil baby-eating villain points his splat-gun at you, pulls the trigger and...";

| inputManager.pauseForMore(true);

| "... suffers a sudden fatal heart attack! ";

And you should find this more works as you want.
In general, instead of the tads-io functions you'll always want to use the corresponding inputManager methods thus:

| Instead of

morePrompt() use inputManager.pauseForMore(true);

| Instead of

inputKey() use inputManager.getKey(nil, nil);

| Instead of inputLine() use inputManager.getInputLine(nil, nil);

The parameters of these methods will only be of interest to you if you want to allow real time events to continue in the background while waiting for user input; this is a complication we shan't go into here - if you need real time processing look at the definition of inputManager in input.t and follow the comments in the library code.