We live in a loud world. Notifications, headlines, the constant hum of something demanding our attention. So when a novel leans into the quiet—the pauses, the white space, the things left unsaid—it can feel almost subversive. I spent a slow afternoon with author Miriam Thorne, whose latest book The Pause Between has been turning heads for exactly that reason. In her sun-drenched study, over a pot of jasmine tea that she refilled three times without asking, we talked about the craft of silence. Not as an absence, but as a presence all its own.
The Architecture of a Pause
Eliza Gale: Your novels are often called “quietly intense.” Is silence something you build into a scene from the ground up, or does it just happen as the characters take over?
Miriam Thorne: Oh, it’s absolutely built. I think of silence as a material, not a gap. It has texture, weight, even a temperature. In The Pause Between, the main character, Elias, is a cartographer who’s slowly losing his voice. His silence isn’t just a symptom—it becomes another person in the room. When I draft, I actually scribble little marks in the margins: a long dash for a held breath, a wavy line for a silence that’s vibrating with anger. Those pauses are the architecture that holds the dialogue up. Without them, the spoken words would just be noise.
Eliza: So you’re almost scoring the prose like music. How do you make sure the reader actually hears that score?
Miriam: By anchoring it in the physical world. A silence after a confession isn’t just empty air. I’ll drop in the sound of a clock ticking, a lawnmower buzzing a few houses away, or the way a character suddenly notices the rough weave of the tablecloth under their fingertips. The outside world floods into the quiet, and that contrast makes the silence feel enormous. It’s about directing the reader’s ear, not just their eye.
Silence as a Character’s Native Tongue
Eliza: Elias’s silence is literal, but you also write people who use quiet as a shield—or a weapon. How do you make one silence feel like a warm blanket and another like a cold shoulder?
Miriam: It all comes down to intent. A protective silence usually comes with a soft gesture—a hand resting on an arm, a look that says I’m here. It’s a shared quiet, almost a pact. The wounding kind is isolating. It’s a scalpel. In my first novel, there’s a scene where a mother and daughter sit at a kitchen table, and the mother’s silence is brutal. I didn’t describe the mother’s face; I described the daughter’s neck getting hot, her throat closing up as if she were the one who couldn’t speak. The body of the person being silenced tells you everything you need to know.
Eliza: So the point-of-view character becomes the translator for the quiet one.
Miriam: Exactly. And sometimes they’re a terrible translator. A character might read their partner’s thoughtful pause as cold indifference, and that misreading can drive the whole plot off a cliff. The gap between what the silence means and what the other person perceives—that’s where tragedy lives. Or comedy, depending on how you spin it. I’m endlessly curious about the private stories we invent to explain a loved one’s quiet moments.
The White Space on the Page
Eliza: Let’s talk about the literal blank spots. You use short chapters—sometimes just a single paragraph—and big breaks within chapters. What’s the visual silence doing for the reader?
Miriam: It’s breath control. A long, unbroken paragraph can feel like a racing mind or a room with no air. A short chapter followed by a blank page is an invitation. I’m handing the reader a moment and saying, “Stay here a while. Don’t rush.” I picked that up from poetry. The white space around a poem is part of the poem. Same goes for literary fiction. The page itself is a canvas, and the emptiness is part of the composition.
Eliza: Do you ever worry someone will just flip past that white space and miss the point?
Miriam: Sure. But I have to trust the readers who pick up this kind of book. They’re not skimmers; they’re lingerers. They’re the ones who finish a chapter and then stare out the window for a minute. I write for them. A skimmer will still get the plot, but they’ll miss the heartbeat. The silence is where the heartbeat is.
Cultural Silences and Unspoken Histories
Eliza: Your work often digs into family histories where certain things are never, ever discussed—an inherited silence. How do you write about something that, by definition, nobody talks about?
Miriam: Through objects and rituals, Eliza. In The Pause Between, there’s a locked drawer in Elias’s childhood home that no one acknowledges. The silence around that drawer is a family member in its own right. I never reveal what’s inside. Instead, I show the father’s eyes sliding away from it, the mother’s hand brushing the wood unconsciously as she walks past. The silence takes on a shape, defined by the behaviors circling it. The reader never learns the secret, but they feel its weight. That’s more haunting than any reveal could be.
Eliza: That’s gutsy, leaving a central mystery unresolved. Doesn’t that risk frustrating people?
Miriam: Maybe for some. But I’m not chasing tidy endings. Life is stuffed with locked drawers we never open. The story is how we arrange ourselves around them. That drawer’s silence is the truth of that family: they chose to bury something together. The act of collective forgetting is the real narrative. If I spelled out the secret, it would shrink into just another plot point. Instead, it stays a ghost.
Dialogue and the Unsaid
Eliza: Let’s flip it. You have a gift for conversations where what’s not said hits harder than the actual words. How do you build subtext?
Miriam: I write the scene twice. First, the ugly draft where everyone says exactly what they mean. It’s usually over-the-top and awful. Then I gut it. I strip out the direct statements and swap in deflections, small talk, questions that are really accusations. The blunt meaning from that first draft becomes the undercurrent. The reader senses the ghost of it beneath the polite surface. It’s like laying down a dark wash of paint, then covering it with a lighter color—the darkness still seeps through.
Eliza: Can you pull an example from The Pause Between?
Miriam: There’s a moment where Elias’s wife, Clara, asks him, “Did you remember to pick up the milk?” In the first draft, she said, “You’re disappearing from this marriage, and I’m terrified.” The milk question, in the context of his growing silence, carries all that terror. He answers, “They were out.” And that’s it. But the reader knows they’re not talking about milk. They’re talking about the emptiness in their fridge and in their bed. The subtext does all the work.
FAQ: Understanding Silence in Literary Fiction
Why do some authors use so much white space and short chapters?
White space and short chapters aren’t just stylistic quirks; they’re deliberate pacing tools. They create a visual and mental pause, giving the reader room to absorb the emotional weight of a scene. This mirrors how we process intense moments in real life—by stopping, reflecting, and sitting with the feeling before moving on. It turns reading from a passive consumption of plot into an active, contemplative experience.
How can I, as a reader, better appreciate the role of silence in a novel?
Start by paying attention to what happens between the lines of dialogue. Notice the physical actions a character takes when they’re silent—do they fidget, stare, or touch an object? Ask yourself what the character is not saying, and why. Consider the cultural or familial rules that might be enforcing that silence. Often, the most profound character revelations are found not in their words, but in the shape and texture of their quiet moments.
Is writing silence a modern literary trend, or does it have deeper roots?
While contemporary authors like Miriam Thorne use it with great intention, the power of the unsaid has deep roots in literature. One can look to the pregnant pauses in Harold Pinter’s plays, the iceberg theory of Ernest Hemingway, or the haunting ellipses in the works of Virginia Woolf. These writers understood that what is omitted can be as potent as what is included, trusting the reader to feel the undercurrents without having them explicitly mapped out.
Can silence in fiction ever be overused, to the point of obscuring the story?
Yes, like any literary device, it requires balance. If every page is filled with cryptic pauses and unspoken secrets, the narrative can become frustratingly opaque. The key is contrast. A moment of silence has power only because it is surrounded by sound—by dialogue, action, or description. The silence must be earned by the context, creating a pattern of tension and release that keeps the reader engaged rather than alienated.
As our conversation wound down, the old clock in her study ticked softly in the background—a perfect underscore to everything Thorne had been saying. “You hear that?” she asked. “That’s the sound of time passing in a quiet room. A novel should make you hear that in your own life.” It’s a reminder that the best fiction doesn’t just tell us a story; it teaches us how to listen.
