Writing - Silence

 Silence is golden and speech is silver.

The phrase originated in Arabic culture and became popular in English through translations in the 19th century.  It emphasises that while speaking can be valuable, there are times when remaining silent is even more advantageous. So it is true in story writing. 

It may seem obvious to say that there should be periods of silence in your story writing, the enigma being that you are describing silence with words. It is quite simple to think of examples where authors have enjoyed themselves describing haunting and mysterious episodes in their work, but it may not be as easy to produce as one would expect. 

When describing action scenes and interactions between characters, the vocabulary used is possibly easy to describe as 'ordinary', as those activities are 'ordinary'. Whereas the words used to describe silence are 'softer' and tending towards the passive. Also, it may be that you want to create darkness in a piece of writing with tension and menace. 

Practising using the silent words can be made easier by looking at suitable pictures like the above. In that case, you would be describing attitude, expression, and body language, a feeling of threat, and the accompanying adrenaline surge. 

Then there are the scenes where no human input is planned or required, but there is an atmosphere that adds value to a piece of writing. The view is of a wild and confused sea whipped into a frenzy of action and irrepressible violence that is well out of the control of any human. Alistair Maclean, in HMS Ulysses, spends a couple of pages describing the sea at night on a convoy route north of Finland during the 2nd World War. It is brilliantly done. 

Charles Dickens' description of the marsh near Pip's home in Great Expectations is haunting. 

There will be hundreds of such examples, and it is worth reading other writers' work to enrich the development of your own. 

God Bless