Everything Is Listening: The Sound of Silence in Fiction
by Maud Casey
We writers spend days, weeks, years (some of us years and years and years), pulling words out of silence. We use those words to compose a particular music. There is the music of the words, and then there is the silence that surrounds and amplifies that music; that silence makes its own music. “In my life there are many silences,” wrote the novelist Juan Rulfo, “and in my writing, too.” Writing is always a matter of curation, and the nesting dolls of silence need arranging as much as anything else. Silence in fiction includes all of the white space around and in between the text, what isn’t being said by the author. Silence surrounds the words, swirling in between and under and around them, limning the edges of sentences. Silence, in the end, isn’t silent at all. It makes noise, it makes room, it makes space; it has all the variety of temperatures and textures. Think of the beats between bits of dialogue, what isn’t being said by the characters, the white space between sections of a story told in fragments, the end of a story. In all of those spaces, there is the echo of the ideas and questions of the narrative, of the sound of sentences, their rhythms, and their syntax, which, of course, are inextricable from the ideas and the questions.
Craft Notes
The more I read and write, the more I come to appreciate how writing is both sonic and spatial. Yes, it has sounds; it has rhythm and cadence. But it also has a shape. It takes up space. The pile of notebooks beside me right now is a testament to that. Wrestling HTML codes to ensure that an author’s work looks right on the website is a testament to that. There’s space. There’s structure. We are not just crafting words. We are not just telling what happens. We are also telling what hasn’t happened and what might never happen and what, perhaps, has happened but will never see the light of day.
The pieces you read yesterday explore the endless variety of silence. Mandy Tu’s “Nargis” uses negation, the words “not” and “but,” to show what isn’t, to show the absences, to show where the words people say might have some unspoken truths beneath them. Alec Prevett’s “The Wet Body” builds toward silence, and the setting of a small, enclosed space makes the sound at the beginning loud and immediate. This, in turn, makes the silence loud when it occurs. It illustrates artful scaling of sound and silence. It truly turns up the quiet by first turning up the noise. Adelina Sarkisyan’s “Spooky” is sonically complex in that it finds silence against the backdrop of music. In another act of layering, it places the silencing of women against the ultimate silence — death.
Taylor Kirby’s “Relics, Registries, and Other Bastard Things” begins with silence in official documents, in a personal history. It speaks to standing in that silence and making sense of it. Later, Kirby recounts “nighttime drives, when the roads were empty, and we both passed the time listening to wind whistling through a gap in the front window’s weather stripping.” Silence is context-dependent. Without the surrounding context, this might sound like a peaceful drive, but it is not. Context is also key in Hannah Grieco’s “Imagine What My Body Would Sound Like,” where noise and silence are interspersed and juxtaposed. Lily Watson’s “Psych 402” deals with the silence of erasure, of the way that systemic racism silences some while amplifying the voices of others.
Jonathan Cardew’s “The Mime-Artist is a Little Drunk But That’s Okay” and Avra Margariti’s “The Things We Do for Love” both feature protagonists who are largely silent, which has a very different effect from the silence that Sir David Attenborough encourages in Yael van der Wouden’s “Dear David.” This dichotomy shows that silence can be a source or symptom of many different states of mind — peace or control, powerlessness or alienation.
Not to belabor this point, but there are so many different types and shapes for silence. Silence is a container that can hold so much.
Exercises
Here are ten exercises to help you explore silence. Pick and choose the ones that speak to you.
- Go back to your endless list of silences. Choose one. Write into that silence from three different perspectives. For instance, how might someone who has just lost a pet move through the silence of 5:00 a.m.? What about someone who has just fallen in love? What if it’s 5:00 a.m. at a campsite on a peaceful morning? What if there’s a bear rooting around the picnic table, and then it suddenly stops? If you are working with characters, try writing into the silence from each character’s perspective. Don’t tell us the context outright.
- Explore an absence. Write about something that is missing, and the silence that surrounds that absence. Here’s a heartbreaking example from Lydia Davis.
- Set up a scene in which there is a major elephant in the room. (And yes, here’s the obligatory model of this.) Do not allow the speakers to engage with the elephant directly. Make them skirt around it. If you’re writing poetry, write a poem in which you as the poet are casting an uncomfortable spotlight on the topic by deliberately writing around it, rather than facing it head-on.
- Write a piece that explicitly uses Hannah Moscovitch’s punctuation list and beats (one-count), pauses (three-count), and silences (six-count). Write your own version of her guide. For instance, “beat” could be described as “the time it takes to gasp when you see another white hair in the mirror.” Make the guide part of the piece itself.
- Read this piece by Megan Pillow. Use parentheses or some other notation of your own invention to insert the unsaid into the said, to lay the subtext bare.
- Dwell in the unknown. Tell me about the places in your hometown that you’ve hardly ever gone to; tell me a family history whose details are hazy. Explore the meaning of that negative space, those silences within yourself.
- Write a piece that builds toward silence. Write a companion piece that builds toward noise.
- Go to your current work-in-progress. Muzzle the primary point-of-view character or speaker. Tell the story of that person’s silence. If you’re working in poetry, this could mean taking the hopeful speaker and replacing them with a pessimist. Write the poem’s filmstrip-negative.
- Maud Casey notes that sentence fragments also contain silence. She notes “a fragment is sometimes a more honest rendering of experience — broken off, interrupted, smashed apart.” Write a piece entirely in fragments.
- Go to your current work-in-progress. Erase every fourth line (after saving a new version, please). Just see what happens. See if any new meanings open up. You can also try this on a published piece of writing.
In our Day 2 Zoom call, we’ll have a bit of small-group discussion about the craft notes and recommended readings, and then we’ll do a couple of writing sprints so you can make progress on the exercises above.
