An Evening with Eliza Gale: Unspoken Words and the Quiet Power of Fiction
Welcome back to elizagalesinterviews.com. I’m Eliza Gale, and tonight I’m sitting down with Miriam Thorne, the novelist and short story writer whose new book, The Pause Between Waves, has everyone talking about what happens when characters stop talking. Her work leans hard into the spaces between words—the hesitations, the things left hanging. Miriam, thanks for coming by.
Miriam Thorne: Thanks, Eliza. I’ve been looking forward to this. Silence is the canvas, really. The words are just the paint.
The Architecture of Absence
Eliza: That’s a lovely way to frame it. In The Pause Between Waves, you’ve got these long stretches where nobody says a word. There’s a scene right after a funeral—the protagonist and her estranged brother in a kitchen, just sitting. The quiet goes on for pages. How do you write something like that without losing people?
Miriam: It’s a gamble, sure. But readers are sharper than we often assume. In that scene, the silence isn’t empty—it’s stuffed with everything they can’t bring themselves to say. My job is to make the weight of it feel real. I zero in on the physical stuff: the fridge humming, dust floating in a shaft of light, the brother’s thumb rubbing a worn spot on the table. The real conversation is in the subtext, in the history the reader already knows. You’re not describing silence; you’re describing the pressure it builds.
Eliza: So you’re building a kind of container for it, giving it edges with sensory details.
Miriam: Exactly. A silence after someone confesses feels different from a silence before a lie. The architecture—the room, the small movements, the cadence of the sentences—tells the reader what sort of quiet they’re sitting inside.
Dialogue’s Shadow: What Characters Don’t Say
Eliza: Your characters often talk in fragments, or they dodge. It rings painfully true. How do you pick what a character says out loud versus what they swallow?
Miriam: I begin with what they want to say—the raw, ugly, beautiful core. Then I run it through their fear, their manners, their love for whoever’s listening. What comes out is usually a compromise. The space between the inner scream and the spoken “I’m fine” is where the character actually lives. When a reader knows the heart is breaking but the character just says “I’m fine,” that’s a small, crushing silence. It’s an invitation to step inside and feel the ache.
Eliza: That gap is where empathy kicks in, right? The reader has to do the emotional heavy lifting.
Miriam: Yes. Spell everything out and you steal that intimate act of co-creation from the reader. Silence in dialogue is a way of saying, “I trust you to get this.”
Structural Silences: The White Space on the Page
Eliza: Let’s talk about the literal white space. Your collection Things We Left in Rooms uses section breaks and even blank pages as part of the story. What’s the idea there?
Miriam: A story’s rhythm isn’t just in the words; it’s in the rests between them. A section break can be a sharp breath. A blank page can be a grave, a reset, a long walk down an empty hall. In one story, a character gets a diagnosis, and the next page is completely blank except for a single line at the bottom. That blankness is the future as they see it—an erasure. It’s a visual silence that lands harder than any paragraph could.
Eliza: It’s almost poetic. You’re using the book’s physical form as a storytelling tool.
Miriam: I picked that up from poetry. Poets know the power of a line break, a stanza break. Prose writers can steal that. The silence on the page is punctuation—it controls pace and emotional punch. A short, choppy chapter followed by a long, still one creates a rhythm of noise and quiet that mirrors what’s going on inside the character.
Cultural and Historical Silences
Eliza: Your work often digs into family secrets and old traumas—things people actively don’t talk about. How does silence work on a bigger, cultural level in your fiction?
Miriam: Families and communities have their own unspoken rules. Some topics are just walled off. In my novel The Ash Tree, about a family tangled up in a historical wrong, the silence is practically a character. It shapes three generations. The younger ones can feel the outline of the secret, the negative space it takes up, and their journey is about learning to ask the right questions. That kind of cultural silence is an inheritance, a debt handed down. Breaking it can be an act of violence or an act of love.
Eliza: And as a writer, you’re treading carefully. You don’t want to just “fix” the silence—that can ring false.
Miriam: Right. Sometimes the truest ending leaves the silence intact, but the characters have found a way to live beside it, or have finally named its shape. Resolution isn’t always about noise; sometimes it’s about making peace with the quiet.
The Reader’s Role: Listening to the Gaps
Eliza: For a reader who’s used to more spelled-out fiction, how would you invite them into these silences? What should they be listening for?
Miriam: I’d say, notice what makes you squirm. When a character changes the subject, when a description hangs too long on an empty room, when a chapter cuts off—ask yourself why. What’s being dodged? What feeling is too big for words? Also, trust your own gut. If a quiet scene leaves you sad, that’s not random. The writer built a bridge of silence, and you walked across it. You’re not missing something; you’re finding it.
Eliza: That’s a great reframe. The silence isn’t missing information; it’s a different kind of information.
Miriam: Yes, an emotional frequency. Some things only come through in a whisper, or in no words at all.
FAQ: Understanding Silence in Literature
Why do some authors use so much white space in their novels?
White space—short chapters, section breaks—controls the reader’s pace and creates emotional breathing room. It can mark a shift in time, point of view, or mood, and often asks the reader to sit with a heavy moment before moving on. It’s a visual tool that echoes the inner silences of the characters.
How can I, as a reader, better interpret what’s left unsaid in a story?
Focus on the subtext: what characters do instead of speak, their physical reactions, the atmosphere of the scene. Ask yourself what the character is avoiding and why. Often, the deepest truths in a story live in the gap between what’s said and what’s felt.
Is silence in fiction a modern technique, or does it have historical roots?
Modernists like Hemingway and Chekhov made the “iceberg theory” and subtext famous, but the unspoken has old roots. You can spot it in the charged pauses of Greek tragedy, the elliptical narratives of ancient Eastern poetry, and the Gothic tradition’s love of secrets and repression. It’s a timeless tool that shifts with each literary age.
Can too much silence in a novel alienate the reader?
Yes, if the silence feels random or unearned. The reader needs enough context to sense the weight of what’s missing. If a narrative is too opaque, it can feel frustrating instead of intriguing. The trick is to provide just enough scaffolding—through character, setting, and prior events—so the silence hums with meaning.
Eliza: Miriam, this has been a quietly stirring conversation. Your work reminds us that what’s left unsaid can hit as hard as a shout. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us tonight.
Miriam: Thank you, Eliza. It’s been a quiet joy.
Miriam Thorne’s latest novel, The Pause Between Waves, is available now. You can find more of her work and upcoming events at her website.
