When the Words Stop: A Talk with Author and Critic James Harrow
We live in a loud world. So loud that the quiet corners of a novel can feel almost defiant. I sat down with James Harrow, the mind behind the stunning novel The Long Pause and a familiar voice in several literary journals, to talk about how silence works on the page. We dug into the pauses between lines of dialogue, the white space framing a paragraph, and all the things characters never quite manage to say. What follows is a conversation about learning to listen for what isn’t there.
The Weight of the Unspoken
Eliza Gale: James, your stories often turn on what characters don’t say. When you’re drafting, is silence a conscious tool, or does it just grow out of the characters themselves?
James Harrow: A little of both, honestly. Anyone who watches real conversations knows the heaviest moments are often the quietest. We’re taught to write crackling dialogue, but in life, people dodge, they drift off, they let a hard sentence just sit there in the air. I’m always hunting for the moment after the speech. That’s where the real work gets done. The silence isn’t a void; it’s stuffed with the character’s internal scramble. In The Long Pause, the whole emotional engine of the first act is the protagonist’s inability to answer a simple question from his daughter. The words he can’t say become a physical presence in the room.
Eliza: I love that—silence as a presence. But how do you actually get that onto the page without just annoying the reader?
James: That’s the technical puzzle. You can’t just keep typing “and then there was a long silence.” That’s a report, not an experience. I try to build a little container for it. I’ll drop in the ambient noise—the fridge humming, a dog barking a few streets over, the character’s own pulse thudding in their ears. By filling the sensory space with these tiny, specific sounds, you make the silence itself feel louder, paradoxically. You’re showing the character’s hyper-awareness of the missing response. The reader leans in. They become part of the awkwardness, or the closeness.
The Architecture of a Pause: White Space and Punctuation
Eliza: Let’s talk about the page itself. The white space between sections, a sudden fragment, the em dash that chops a thought in half. How do you see these visual silences working on a reader?
James: I think of them as breath. A page that’s a solid wall of text can feel like a character who’s manic, or refusing to let you in. A page with one short paragraph floating in all that white space is a held breath. It’s a visual nudge to the reader: slow down, sit with the weight of what just happened. An em dash is a violent silence—a thought cut off by a surge of feeling or a knock at the door. An ellipsis is a trailing silence, a thought that just dissolves into doubt. These aren’t just grammar choices; they’re choreography for the reader’s eye and their emotional rhythm.
Eliza: Do you ever worry that a modern reader, trained on the rapid-fire scroll of digital media, just doesn’t have the patience for this kind of deliberate quiet?
James: I think it’s the opposite, actually. I think readers are starving for it. We’re all living under a constant barrage of notifications. A novel that offers a pocket of genuine quiet, a place where you can hear a character think, is a refuge. It’s not about being slow; it’s about being intentional. The silence in literary fiction is a form of respect for the reader’s intelligence. It says, “I trust you to fill this space with your own empathy, your own sense of what this character is going through.” It’s a collaboration.
Cultural Silences and What Can’t Be Named
Eliza: Your new novel wrestles with a family legacy of trauma that’s never openly discussed. Can you talk about the difference between a personal, fleeting silence and a larger, cultural or familial one?
James: A momentary silence is a held note. A cultural silence is a whole missing movement in a symphony. In families, there are often subjects that are just walled off. Nobody says, “We don’t talk about your uncle’s accident.” They just don’t. The silence becomes a structural part of the family’s identity. As a writer, you have to build the story around that void, like a house built around a sealed room. The characters’ actions, their strange avoidances, their inexplicable fears—all of that is the language of that silence. The trick is to make the reader sense the shape of the missing thing without ever explicitly naming it until the moment of rupture, if that rupture ever even comes.
Eliza: That’s a powerful technique. It makes me think of the “iceberg theory” and how the bulk of the story’s meaning is submerged. But you’re talking about something even the characters themselves might not have access to.
James: Exactly. Hemingway’s iceberg is often about the author’s deliberate omission of backstory. What I’m exploring is the characters’ own repression. The story’s meaning is submerged not just for the reader, but for the people living it. The narrative voice has to be complicit in that silence, to some degree, to make it feel authentic. It can’t be a clever authorial trick where you wink at the reader and say, “I know something you don’t know.” It has to feel like a genuine, shared blindness that slowly, painfully comes into focus.
Silence as a Response to the Ineffable
Eliza: Moving beyond trauma, how does silence function in moments of profound beauty or spiritual awe in fiction? The moments where language genuinely fails.
James: That’s the most delicate use of silence. It’s the acknowledgment that some experiences exist beyond the net of language. If a character witnesses something sublime—a natural phenomenon, an act of profound kindness, a moment of mystical clarity—and the writer tries to capture it with ornate description, it can feel like a betrayal. It shrinks the experience. Instead, you can show the character’s reaction to the failure of language. Their mouth opens, but no sound comes out. They try to write about it later and the page remains blank. The silence becomes a testament to the magnitude of the experience. It’s a way of saying, “This was bigger than our little system of grunts and symbols.”
Eliza: That’s a stunning distinction. Do you have a favorite example of that from another writer’s work?
James: I always return to the ending of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. The whole novel is a long, loving letter from a father to his son, and it’s filled with such careful, precise language. But the very end dissolves into a kind of quiet blessing that feels like it’s moving beyond words. It’s a silence that isn’t empty but is full of a peace that the prose has been reaching for the entire book. She earns that silence by writing so beautifully up to the point where words are no longer sufficient.
The Reader’s Role in the Quiet
Eliza: You mentioned earlier that silence is a collaborative act with the reader. Can you expand on that? How do you, as a writer, create a silence that invites the reader in rather than shutting them out?
James: It’s about preparation. A silence that comes out of nowhere is just a gap. It’s confusing. But a silence that is the logical, emotional conclusion of a carefully built scene is an invitation. You’ve given the reader all the emotional data they need. The character’s history, the tension in the room, the stakes of the conversation. Then, when the words stop, the reader doesn’t stop. Their imagination kicks into overdrive. They are actively constructing the character’s internal state. They are asking, “What is she thinking? What would I feel?” That’s the collaboration. The writer provides the structure and the emotional charge, and the reader provides the meaning within the quiet.
Eliza: It strikes me that this requires a tremendous amount of trust in the reader.
James: It’s the only way to write something that has depth. If you explain everything, you leave the reader with nothing to do but passively consume. That’s entertainment, which is fine, but it’s not art. Art requires a participatory witness. Silence is the ultimate gesture of trust. You’re handing the most important part of the scene—its emotional resolution—to the reader and saying, “You finish this. You know enough now. You’re capable.”
Silence as a Character’s Voice
Eliza: I’m thinking of characters who are defined by their quietness—not shyness, but a kind of profound reserve. How do you make a quiet character compelling on the page, where everything is, by definition, made of words?
James: You have to make their silence active, not passive. A passive quiet character just fades into the wallpaper. An actively quiet character is one whose silence is a choice, a form of power or resistance. You show the impact of their silence on the world around them. Other characters might project onto them, become unnerved by them, confess things to them. Their quietness becomes a mirror or a magnet. You also show the immense internal life that their silence protects. Through close third-person or first-person narration, you reveal that while they are silent externally, they are anything but silent internally. The contrast between their rich inner monologue and their sparse spoken words creates a fascinating tension.
Eliza: That internal monologue is key, then. The silence on the outside amplifies the noise on the inside.
James: Precisely. And that’s a very human experience. We all have a roaring internal world that we filter into a trickle of speech. Fiction lets us show both streams simultaneously. A character who says, “I’m fine,” while their mind is screaming is a character every reader recognizes. The silence of their spoken words is a lie, and the truth is in the unspoken narration. That gap is where the character’s real personality lives.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I, as a writer, practice using silence more effectively in my own fiction?
Start by observing real conversations. Note how often people pause, deflect, or leave sentences unfinished. Then, in your drafts, look for places where you’ve over-explained a character’s feelings. Try cutting the last line or two of a dialogue exchange and replace it with a small, telling action—a character straightening a fork, or looking out a window. Read the scene again. Often, the silence will say more than the words you removed.
Doesn’t too much silence risk making a story feel slow or boring?
It can, if the silence isn’t doing any work. The key is that the silence must be charged. It must contain an unasked question, an unspoken confession, or a suppressed emotion. If the silence is just empty space, it’s dead air. But if it’s tense, if the reader is leaning in to hear what isn’t being said, then it’s the opposite of boring—it’s gripping. The pacing comes from the emotional intensity, not the number of words.
Is there a difference between how silence is used in literary fiction versus genre fiction?
Generally, yes, though it’s not a hard rule. Genre fiction often prioritizes plot momentum, so silence can be seen as a brake on the action. However, the best genre fiction uses silence masterfully in moments of high tension—the quiet before a gunfight, the pause before a detective reveals the killer. In literary fiction, the silence is often the point itself; it’s the space where character and meaning are forged. The plot may slow, but the internal stakes skyrocket.
How do you handle silence in a first-person narrative versus a third-person narrative?
In first-person, silence is a direct expression of the narrator’s consciousness. They can tell the reader, “I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.” The silence is filtered through their perspective. In third-person, you have more options. You can show the silence from the outside, describing the character’s frozen posture, or you can dip into their thoughts to show the turmoil beneath the quiet exterior. A close third-person can achieve a similar intimacy to first-person, while a more distant third-person can make the character’s silence feel enigmatic and strange.
