On the Spaces Between Words, and Why They Matter
Silence in fiction is the shadow cast by dialogue—it gives shape to what’s actually said, but the shadow itself does half the work. I met Thomas Grey in the back corner of a bookstore café, the kind of place where the espresso machine hisses into long pauses. His novel The Long Pause just won the Whitfield Prize, and the judges kept circling the same thing: how the quiet in his pages felt louder than the noise. Grey teaches creative writing at Benton College and has written three books, each one a little more obsessed with the burden of what never gets spoken.
Eliza Gale: Thomas, when I think of silence in novels, I picture those white gulfs between sections—places to breathe. But you work the silence right into the sentences. How did you learn to trust it that much?
Thomas Grey: I learned by doing it badly first. The early draft of The Long Pause was a chatterbox. Every character explained their feelings like they were giving a deposition. My editor, Miriam Klass, circled one page and wrote, “Let them sit with it.” That stung. I’d been terrified the reader wouldn’t get it unless I spoon-fed them. So I started cutting. Dialogue went, then whole chunks of interior thought. The characters got sharper the less they performed. Turns out, people are more believable when they shut up.
Eliza: That’s a risky handoff—you’re leaving the reader to do some of the heavy lifting. Do you think silence asks more of an audience than direct exposition does?
Thomas: Without question. It’s a joint project. When a character doesn’t answer a question, the reader fills that hole with their own history of being ignored or shut out. My father was a quiet man. I grew up decoding his silences: was it anger, sadness, or just a long day? That ambiguity felt more honest than any speech. I try to carry that into my fiction—the idea that people are opaque to each other, and sometimes to themselves.
The Pause as a Structural Bone
Grey’s second novel, Brine and Stone, kicks off with a three-page chapter that’s just a kitchen at dawn. No people, no action—just light climbing the walls. Critics called it brave. Some readers called it infuriating. I asked him about the gamble of pushing away an audience that’s been trained to expect constant motion.
Thomas: I think of those still moments as a held breath before someone speaks. In music, the rest is as deliberate as the note. In fiction, a pause can flip the power dynamic—who gets to stay silent, and who’s forced to fill the air? In Brine and Stone, that mute kitchen belongs to the wife. The husband never crosses the threshold. Her silence there isn’t a lack; it’s a refusal. She’s keeping something from him—and from us.
Eliza: That’s a shift—silence as a kind of muscle, not a weakness. How do you make that difference land on the page without just announcing it?
Thomas: Physical detail does the heavy lifting. The wife runs a finger along the rim of a coffee cup, traces the wood grain on the table. Her movements are private and exact. The silence isn’t empty; her body fills it. When the husband finally speaks, it’s from another room, and his voice feels like an interruption. That contrast tells you everything about who holds the cards, no commentary needed.
It reminds me of something the poet Jane Hirshfield once said about “the heat of what is not said.” In the right hands, a silence can burn hotter than a confession. But building that heat takes more than just hitting delete.
Writing the Unspoken: Technique Meets Gut Feeling
Eliza: Let’s dig into the craft. When you’re drafting, do you plan your silences, or do they show up later?
Thomas: Mostly later. My first drafts are a mess—characters yammer on, and I let them. That’s how I figure out who they are. Then I go back and ask: what would this person never say out loud? What’s too sharp, too risky, or just beyond their reach? I cut until the words that survive feel necessary. Sometimes a twenty-page chapter ends up at six.
Eliza: That takes a pretty cold eye. How do you decide what stays?
Thomas: I read it aloud and pay attention to where the sentences land. If a line doesn’t carry its emotional weight, it’s gone. I also hunt for moments where a character’s silence would tell a harder truth. In The Long Pause, the protagonist’s mother never says she loves him. She leaves food on his doorstep, mends his coat while he sleeps. That wordless care felt more real to me than any dialogue could.
We got talking about the family tree of silence in literature. Grey pointed to Chekhov’s stories, where people routinely fail to say the one thing that matters, and to Hemingway’s iceberg trick—seven-eighths of the story lurking underwater. But he also mentioned a less obvious touchstone: the films of Yasujirō Ozu, where the camera lingers on empty rooms after the characters leave, letting the emotional residue hang in the air.
Thomas: Ozu showed me that absence can hold presence. After someone walks out of the frame, you feel them more sharply. I chase that in prose—scenes where the aftermath of speech outweighs the speech itself. A door slamming, a breath caught, a room slowly losing its light.
The Reader’s Job and the Limits of Quiet
Eliza: Do you ever worry that a reader might just miss it—that the silence will read as empty, not charged?
Thomas: All the time. But I’d rather they be puzzled by a silence than feel condescended to by an explanation. Trusting the reader is part of the deal. That said, silence has to be earned. You can’t just slap down a blank page and call it profound. The surrounding text has to build enough pressure to make the pause mean something. In The Long Pause, the climactic quiet comes after a betrayal—by then, the reader knows exactly what’s on the line.
We talked about the cultural angle, too. Grey noted that Western storytelling often favors speech—confession, argument, proclamation—while Eastern traditions have long made room for the eloquence of the unsaid. He’s careful not to turn that into a cliché, but he admits it colored his early reading of Kawabata and Ishiguro, writers whose narrators give themselves away by what they leave out.
Eliza: Is there a risk of silence becoming a stylistic tic, a habit instead of a real choice?
Thomas: Oh, definitely. I’ve seen manuscripts where every chapter trails off into an ellipsis, and after a while you just go numb. Silence is like salt—just enough, and the whole thing sings; too much, and it’s inedible. It has to serve the story, not the writer’s ego. If a pause doesn’t open up character or tighten the tension, it’s just a gap.
I asked Grey to read something that captured his approach. He picked a scene from Brine and Stone: the wife has just learned about her husband’s affair. She sits at the kitchen table while he hovers in the doorway. She doesn’t say a word for two pages. Grey read it softly, letting the rests in the text become rests in the room. It was nearly uncomfortable, like walking in on someone’s private grief.
Thomas: That scene went through twenty drafts. I kept adding her thoughts, her fury, her justifications. Every time, the scene got flatter. Eventually I stripped it down to her physical actions—pouring tea, watching the steam curl, setting the cup down without drinking. Her silence became her dignity. The husband’s discomfort filled the room, and the reader feels it without being told.
Teaching the Quiet to New Writers
Grey’s workshops at Benton College circle around what he calls “negative space writing.” Students bring in bloated passages and practice cutting every third sentence, then every other. The point isn’t minimalism as a fashion statement—it’s about learning to hear the rhythm of holding back.
Eliza: What do your students wrestle with most when you nudge them toward silence?
Thomas: Fear, mostly. They’re scared the reader won’t get it, or that they’ll look lazy or obscure. I tell them: the reader is sharper than you think. Give them the bones and they’ll build the rest. The big breakthrough usually comes when a student guts a long-winded explanation and realizes the scene suddenly has more power. They stop dictating emotion and start inviting it.
He told me about a recent example: a student wrote a piece about a father and daughter after a funeral. The original draft had them discussing their grief in exhaustive detail. Grey suggested the father simply hand the daughter a photograph and leave the room. The revised scene, he said, was wrecking—the silence carried everything.
Eliza: That move from telling to showing through absence seems to be the spine of your whole method.
Thomas: It’s about honoring the mystery. People aren’t fully knowable, even to the folks who love them. Fiction that pretends otherwise rings false to me. Silence respects that opacity. It says: I can’t hand you the whole truth, but I can show you its outline.
As we wrapped up, I caught myself noticing the little gaps between our own words—the pauses where a thought gathers itself. Grey’s attention to the unsaid had recalibrated something in me, made me aware of how much travels between people without language. Maybe that’s the real gift of his fiction: it trains you to listen to the quiet.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is silence such a powerful tool in literary fiction?
Silence hands the reader an active role. When a character goes quiet, the reader has to interpret the gap using context, body language, and everything that came before. That collaboration deepens the emotional pull and often communicates what words can’t—grief, shame, love, or defiance. It also echoes real life, where the unsaid usually outweighs whatever gets spoken.
How can a writer use silence without confusing the audience?
Silence needs a frame. The surrounding story should build enough tension or meaning that the pause feels necessary, not random. Physical details—a gesture, a setting, an object—can fill the quiet with purpose. Reading the work aloud helps test whether a pause holds weight or just drains momentum. Most of all, silence should serve the character and the story, not the writer’s vanity.
Can overusing silence weaken a story?
Yes. If every scene ends with a trailing off or a prolonged stillness, the effect turns predictable and loses its bite. Silence works best when it plays off speech; the back-and-forth between spoken and unspoken creates rhythm. Writers should treat silence as a deliberate choice, deployed only where it reveals something essential about a character or a relationship.
