The Space Between Words: Julian Croft on Silence as Story

Where It Started: A Kitchen Clock and a Half-Finished Sentence

Eliza: Your book opens with a memory I can’t shake—your grandmother, mid-story, going quiet while the kitchen clock ticked loud enough to fill the whole house. Was that the first time silence felt like a literary thing to you?

Julian: It was the first time, yes. I didn’t have a name for it then. She’d be telling me about a neighbor back in the old country, and then—nothing. Her mouth would close, her eyes would go somewhere else, and that clock just… took over. The silence wasn’t a void. It was heavy. It held everything she wouldn’t let herself say. I was a kid, but I knew the story hadn’t ended. It had just changed shape. I started seeing that same shape everywhere: in Hemingway’s stripped-down paragraphs, in the white space between Chekhov’s lines, in the grief that smolders under Toni Morrison’s Sula. That ticking clock was my tuning fork.

When Keeping Quiet Is an Act of Power

Eliza: You make a case that fictional silence is rarely passive—it’s a kind of pushback, especially for characters who’ve been talked over their whole lives. Can you unpack that a little?

Julian: Imagine a character who’s always been defined by other people. Explained. Dismissed. When that character clamps their mouth shut—or when the narrative refuses to let us inside their head—it’s a line in the sand. It says, “You don’t get my story on your terms.” In Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the silences around certain histories aren’t holes. They’re walls. The reader has to sit in that discomfort, in the not-knowing. That’s political. And on a smaller, more domestic scale, think of a Jhumpa Lahiri couple. What they don’t say to each other builds whole cathedrals of love and wreckage.

The Craft of the Unspoken

Eliza: I’m putting on my writer hat now. How do you actually put silence on the page? Is it just about paragraph breaks and em-dashes, or is there more to it?

Julian: The dashes and the white space are what you see, sure. The em-dash that cuts off a confession. The tiny paragraph that follows a long, gorgeous description—it’s like a held breath after a sigh. But the deeper trick is building a scene so charged that the silence rings. E.M. Forster talked about “the pattern of the carpet.” You lay down a rhythm—speech, detail, heat—and then you snap it. The reader’s brain rushes into that gap, and what they find there is usually sharper than anything you could’ve written. It’s a collaboration. You have to trust the reader with your whole chest.

Eliza: That trust feels like a risk right now, when everyone’s attention is fractured.

Julian: It is a risk. But literary fiction has always been a slow burn. It demands a different kind of focus. When a reader stays with a quiet moment—like that wordless final scene in Ian McEwan’s Atonement—they aren’t just consuming a product. They’re making meaning. That’s the payoff.

When the Narrator Goes Quiet

Eliza: You’ve got a whole chapter on “narrative silence”—when the storytelling voice itself pulls back. How is that different from a character who just stops talking?

Julian: Narrative silence is more unsettling. When a character goes quiet, we can usually still interpret the moment. We’ve been given tools. But when the narrator—omniscient, first-person, close-third, doesn’t matter—refuses to show us a key piece of information, the whole deal between writer and reader gets tested. It happens in that gut-punch ending of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Stevens has been narrating his life with this painful, careful self-deception, and then at the end, there’s a breakdown we never actually see. We see only what’s left afterward. That silence is a brutal act of mercy and judgment. The narrator can’t go there, so we have to.

Tradition, Trauma, and the Spaces Between

Eliza: Reading your book, I started thinking about how different literary traditions handle quiet. You bring up Japan’s ma—that meaningful pause—and then you pivot to post-colonial writers who use silence to carry historical trauma. Can you tease those two apart?

Julian: Ma is a good door into this. It’s the space between sounds, between objects, that matters as much as the things themselves. In Kawabata’s Snow Country, the silences aren’t a breakdown in communication. They’re the communication. It’s a shared understanding that words can be too clumsy. Now flip that. In post-colonial fiction, silence is often the wound. In Edwidge Danticat’s work, or Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins, what isn’t said carries the weight of violence, displacement, being erased. The narrative has to honor that silence without exploiting it. It’s a tightrope. The silence becomes a kind of memorial—a way of saying, “This horror is beyond my words, and I won’t dress it up in pretty sentences.”

Reading the Gaps: Tips for Readers and Writers

Eliza: For our readers who love novels but have never analyzed silence this way, what should they look for the next time they pick up a book?

Julian: Watch what characters don’t say to each other. And watch what the narrator seems to be dodging. Look at the page itself—short chapters, big margins, a scene that just… stops. Ask yourself: what feeling is living in that space? Shame? Longing? Rage? Also, notice your own squirming. If you want to race past a quiet passage, that’s your cue to stop. The silence is doing its job.

Eliza: And for writers trying to be more intentional about this?

Julian: Read your drafts out loud. Where does your voice trail off? Where do you pause without meaning to? That’s usually the prose saying it needs more air. Don’t be afraid to cut a line of dialogue and replace it with a gesture. A character staring into a coffee cup instead of answering can carry more weight than a whole speech. And trust the reader. It’s the hardest lesson and the most generous gift you can give.