We live in a loud world, and most novels feel the need to shout over it. But sometimes the most powerful moments in a story happen in the gaps—the pauses, the things left unsaid. I sat down with literary author Miriam Thorne, whose latest work, The Pause Between Waves, has been praised for its deft handling of quiet and restraint, to talk about how silence can carry a narrative.
The Architecture of a Pause
Eliza Gale: Miriam, your new novel feels like a study in restraint. There are conversations where the real drama is in what the characters don’t say. Was that a structural choice from the start?
Miriam Thorne: It was. I think of silence as a presence, not an absence. It’s a physical thing on the page. When I draft, I often let the characters spill everything—all the messy, explicit dialogue—and then, in revision, I start cutting. The real story is in the resistance to speech. What a character refuses to say tells you more about their fears and desires than any monologue. The white space becomes a held breath.
Eliza: That’s a lovely image. But how do you signal that held breath to a reader without leaving them confused? A book can’t just show a silent close-up like a film.
Miriam: You’re right, you can’t just drop a blank page and expect it to work. You have to fill the silence with the body. A character traces the rim of a coffee cup, smooths a crease in their trousers that isn’t there, stares at a crack in the ceiling. These tiny, precise gestures become the language of the unspoken. In my novel, there’s a scene after a terrible fight where a husband and wife sit at the kitchen table for three pages without a word. She refolds a napkin four times. He watches her hands. That’s it. But the whole history of their marriage is in that napkin.
The Sound of Subtext
Eliza: There’s a risk, though. A reader might miss the subtext entirely. How do you make a quiet moment legible?
Miriam: You have to earn it. A meaningful silence only works if the reader already knows what’s at stake. You can’t open a novel with a long, loaded pause—nobody knows the characters yet. I establish a character’s usual rhythm first. In The Pause Between Waves, Elias is a nervous talker, always filling the air with chatter. So when he finally shuts up, the reader feels the weight of it. The quiet is legible because it’s a break in a pattern we’ve carefully built.
Eliza: So silence becomes a kind of character portrait.
Miriam: Exactly. It’s not just a stylistic trick. How a character relates to silence tells you who they are. Do they fear it? Use it as a weapon? Find peace in it? In my book, the mother’s silence is a fortress; the daughter’s silence is a wound. They’re both quiet, but for completely different reasons. The prose has to make that distinction clear through what surrounds the quiet—the tension in a jaw, the history hanging in the room.
Chekhov’s Gun and the Modernist Gap
Eliza: Your approach reminds me of Chekhov’s idea that the artist shouldn’t solve the problem, just state it correctly. Are you working in that tradition on purpose?
Miriam: Very much so. Chekhov trusted the reader to do half the labor. He gives us the symptoms and trusts us to find the disease. That’s the gift of literary fiction—it respects the reader’s mind. When I leave a silence, I’m not being coy. I’m inviting the reader to step in and complete the emotional circuit. The meaning gets made in the space between my hint and the reader’s own experience of loss or love or regret.
Eliza: Do you think today’s readers still have the patience for that? We’re swimming in content that over-explains everything.
Miriam: I think they’re desperate for it. We’re bombarded with stories that tell us exactly how to feel, with music cues and reaction shots. A novel that offers a quiet space, that asks you to sit with ambiguity, can feel like a deep breath. It’s a different kind of engagement—not passive consumption, but active co-creation. I’ve had readers tell me they had to put the book down and just sit with a scene. That’s the best compliment I could get.
The Craft of the Ellipsis
Eliza: Let’s get into the weeds a bit. The ellipsis, the em dash—these are the tools of interruption and trailing off. Do you have rules for how you use them?
Miriam: I’m a tyrant about punctuation. An ellipsis is a fading, a thought dissipating. An em dash is a sharp cut, an interruption. I never swap them. In dialogue, an ellipsis suggests the character is drifting away, getting lost in their own head. An em dash is violence—someone else cutting in, or the character slamming a door on their own thought. Getting that right is part of the music. And then there’s the simplest tool of all: the period. A full stop where a comma would normally go. It creates a fracture. “I love you.” versus “I love you…” versus “I love you—” are three completely different statements.
Eliza: That’s fascinating. Punctuation as psychological notation.
Miriam: Exactly. It’s the score for how the sentence should be heard in the mind. Silence in fiction isn’t just about missing words; it’s about the rhythm of the words that are there. A short, declarative sentence after a long, flowing paragraph lands like a stone in a pond. The silence that follows is the ripples.
Silence as a Narrative Strategy
Eliza: Beyond the sentence level, you use silence structurally. There’s a central event in your novel that’s never directly narrated. Why make that choice?
Miriam: The central trauma in The Pause Between Waves is a car accident the protagonist caused. I never describe the crash itself. You see the moments leading up to it, and then you see the aftermath—the hospital room, the guilt, the legal mess. But the crash is a blank space. I made that choice because no description I could write would be as powerful as the reader’s own imagination. We’ve all seen crashes, in movies, in nightmares. By refusing to fill in that image, I force the reader to supply their own, which makes it personal and more horrifying. The silence around the event also mirrors the protagonist’s trauma—his mind won’t go back there, so the narrative won’t either.
Eliza: It’s a risky move. Weren’t you worried readers would feel cheated out of a dramatic set piece?
Miriam: A little. But I trusted that the emotional truth of the aftermath would hit harder than any screeching tires and broken glass I could write. Literary fiction isn’t about the event; it’s about the echo of the event. The silence after the gunshot, not the gunshot itself. That’s where the real story lives.
FAQ: Understanding Silence in Fiction
Q: Isn’t silence in a novel just a lack of dialogue? How is that different from a character simply being alone?
A: That’s a key distinction. A character being alone and described as thinking isn’t necessarily narrative silence. True silence is a charged absence where the reader is acutely aware of what isn’t being said, often in a context where speech is expected. It’s the tension between the potential for words and the refusal or inability to speak them. A character alone, peacefully gardening, is not a silence; it’s a described action. A character staring at a phone, willing it to ring, is a silence filled with unspoken longing.
Q: How can a writer avoid making a silent scene feel boring or static?
A: The key is internal movement. Even if the external action is minimal, the internal landscape must be volatile. Use sensory detail to keep the reader grounded in the physical world while the emotional world churns. The character notices the drip of a faucet, the hum of a refrigerator, the texture of a blanket. These small, concrete details anchor the reader and create a rhythm. The silence becomes a container for a storm of feeling, not an empty room. The prose itself must do the work that dialogue usually does—its cadence, its imagery, its sudden shifts in sentence length all create a kind of music that fills the quiet.
Q: Can silence be overused in a novel? What are the warning signs?
Miriam: Absolutely. Silence is a spice, not the meal. If every scene is built around what’s unsaid, the novel becomes opaque and frustrating. The reader needs moments of directness, of revelation, to orient themselves. The warning sign is when you, as the writer, are using silence to avoid writing a difficult scene. Are you skipping the confrontation because you don’t know how to write it? That’s evasion, not craft. True narrative silence is a deliberate choice made in service of emotional truth, not a shortcut. The reader will sense the difference. They’ll feel manipulated rather than moved.
Finding Your Own Quiet Register
Eliza: For aspiring writers reading this, what’s a practical exercise to get better at writing silence?
Miriam: Take a scene you’ve already written that’s heavy with dialogue—an argument, a confession—and rewrite it with no spoken words. None. Force the characters to communicate everything through action, setting, and internal monologue. It will feel impossible at first. But you’ll discover that a slammed cupboard can say “I’m furious” more effectively than a shouted insult, and that a character carefully watering a plant can say “I’m trying to hold onto something alive” more poignantly than a monologue. It teaches you to trust the physical world of your story and to respect your reader’s ability to interpret it.
Eliza: That’s a wonderful challenge. Finally, Miriam, what are you reading right now that exemplifies this quiet power?
Miriam: I’m re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It’s a novel that’s essentially one long, quiet letter from a father to his son. The silences in it are the things the father can’t bring himself to confess, the forgiveness he can’t quite ask for. It’s a masterclass in how a gentle, restrained voice can carry immense emotional weight. I always return to it when I need to remember that stillness is not the same as silence, and that the most powerful stories are often told in a whisper.
