The Spaces Between Words: A Conversation on Silence in Literary Fiction

Where the Story Began

Eliza Gale: Helena, your previous books were full of dialogue—witty, rapid-fire exchanges. The Long Pause feels like a deliberate turn toward quiet. What sparked that shift?

Helena Marsh: I think it came from a place of exhaustion, honestly. I’d finished my last novel and felt like I’d said everything I could say out loud. Then my aunt passed away, and I inherited a box of her letters. There were gaps—years where she’d written nothing, or only a line: “Too much to say.” That phrase stuck with me. I started wondering if the truest things are the ones we can’t articulate. So I wrote a book where the central mystery is never solved, where the characters circle around an event without ever naming it directly.

EG: Did you worry readers would feel cheated by that?

HM: Terrified. My editor kept asking, “But what happened?” And I’d say, “That’s the point—it’s not about what happened, it’s about how the not-knowing shapes them.” I think literary fiction is one of the few places we can honor that. Real life is full of unresolved silences. My aunt’s letters didn’t come with a neat explanation. Neither does the book.

The Craft of Omission

EG: Let’s talk about technique. How do you write a silence that feels loaded, rather than just empty? I’m thinking of the scene where your character, Iris, sits in her father’s study and touches his papers for five pages without a single line of dialogue.

HM: That scene was the hardest to get right. I must have rewritten it twenty times. The key was physical detail—the texture of the desk, the way the light fell on the dust, the sound of her own breathing. When you remove speech, you have to lean into the sensory world. I also played with sentence length. Short, clipped sentences make a silence feel tense. Longer, flowing ones make it feel meditative. In that scene, I wanted the tension of a held breath, so I kept the prose tight.

EG: There’s also the silence between chapters. You leave some pretty startling gaps—one ends mid-argument, the next picks up a decade later. What’s your thinking there?

HM: I wanted the structure itself to mirror the theme. The reader has to experience the discomfort of missing time. It’s a bit cruel, I admit. But I trust readers to fill those gaps with their own emotions. My job is to provide enough shadow that they can imagine the shape of what’s missing. One reviewer called it “narrative negative space,” which I love.

Silence as a Character Trait

EG: In The Long Pause, the father, Arthur, is almost entirely silent. He speaks maybe three times in the whole novel. How did you approach building a character who refuses to reveal himself?

HM: Through the eyes of others, mostly. Iris watches him, interprets his gestures, misinterprets his silence as anger or grief or indifference. The reader never knows if she’s right. I drew on people I’ve known—my grandfather was a man of few words, and as a child, I’d invent whole inner monologues for him. That’s what we do with silent people; we project. So Arthur becomes a canvas for the family’s anxieties. His silence is the engine of the story.

EG: Do you think silence can be a form of power in fiction?

HM: Absolutely. The person who refuses to explain themselves controls the narrative. Think of Bartleby in Melville’s story—“I would prefer not to.” That refusal is so unsettling because it denies the other characters a resolution. In my book, Arthur’s silence keeps everyone orbiting around him. It’s a quiet tyranny.

Drawing from Life and Literature

EG: Were there other writers you looked to for guidance on handling silence?

HM: Marilynne Robinson, especially Gilead. That book is a long letter from a father to a son, and it’s full of pauses, digressions, things left unsaid out of love. And Penelope Fitzgerald—she could do more with a single unspoken glance than most writers do with pages of dialogue. I reread The Blue Flower while drafting, just to remind myself how much weight a gesture can carry.

EG: Is there a silence in real life that you’ve never managed to put into words?

HM: My mother’s silence after my brother died. We never talked about it, not once, for fifteen years. I’ve tried to write it, but it’s too vast. Maybe that’s why I keep circling the theme—I’m trying to understand why some things stay sealed. Fiction lets me explore that without breaking the seal.

Reader Reactions and the Risk of Quiet

EG: How have readers responded to a book that asks them to sit with so much quiet? It’s not exactly a beach read.

HM: It’s been polarizing, honestly. Some readers have written to say it felt like a meditation, that they wept at the end without knowing why. Others have called it frustrating, even boring. I get that. We’re conditioned to want answers. But I think there’s a hunger for fiction that respects the complexity of silence. In a noisy world, a quiet book can feel like a refuge—or a challenge. I’m okay with both.

EG: Your next project—are you sticking with this quiet mode, or moving back toward the verbal fireworks?

HM: I’m working on a novel about a lighthouse keeper who loses his voice. So, yes—even quieter. I seem to be stripping things back, layer by layer. Maybe by the time I’m eighty, I’ll just publish blank pages and insist they’re profound.

(We both laugh, and a comfortable silence settles between us. I don’t rush to fill it.)