Letting Silence Sit on the Page
Launch library · evergreen read
Not every important moment in a memoir needs to be filled with words explaining what it meant to the writer. Sometimes the most powerful choice a writer can make is to let a scene end without commentary. This means trusting a reader to sit with the silence exactly as the writer once had to sit with it themselves.
This restraint runs against the instinct to explain, to make sure the reader fully understands the significance of a moment on the page. But over-explaining a quiet scene often drains it of its power entirely. It replaces lived silence with analysed silence, which reads very differently to anyone encountering it for the first time.
Writers who trust their reader with unexplained silence tend to produce more affecting work as a result. The reader is doing some of the emotional labour themselves in that case, arriving at meaning rather than being handed it fully formed on the page from the very first line.