The Duality of Stillness: Pitfalls and Perks of Silence in Writing
There’s the silence of breathing room, and then there’s the silence of isolation
Today the universe tossed me a couple of writerly bones — two fresh pieces of writing from two of my favorite writing inspirations, both bringing me to the same topic: silence. (By “fresh,” by the way, I mean fresh to me, not necessarily freshly published.)
Silence is an appropriate topic several times over for me, because for a long time, and for more than one important period in my life, I’ve been largely silent. That’s silent as a writer, as a human, as what’s sometimes called a marginalized person. Sometimes I call this silence writer’s block, and it is that, but to reduce it to that is to see only part of it.
Silence is both the place from which I write and a symptom of the feeling that I cannot write. Silence can be positive — a safe space, nurturing, receptive, waiting to become — or a sign of unsafety, a weapon — a cutting silence, one in which we are cut off from each other.
Silence can be exhausted, exhausting, empty — or gravid, resonant with the potential of the things that may yet be said. Then again, it can be full of unspoken suffering, a veil for things that fear exposure because they are our vulnerable points.
The nature of silence, as with the nature of many things in reality, perhaps as with everything, is multifaceted. There are silences it hurts to break, silences that long to be broken, silences so precious we want them never to end.
Some of the things that silence me as a writer when I would rather be speaking out, and that probably also silence people other than me:
- Lack of a sense of safety
- Lack of energy—often a deep lack, a genuine exhaustion, rather than an everyday, hard-working tiredness
- Lack of faith in myself—again, I mean this in a stronger sense than mild insecurity; to be silenced by lack of faith in myself is to have a wounded identity
- Lack of ability to see value in my story
And then there are beautiful things about silence, aspects of silence that I have loved as a writer or artist or dreamer, for instance:
- When it holds sacred space for me and my story
- When it invites me to expand into it
- When it gives me a place to rest, recuperate, and regenerate
- When it feels open with broad possibility
This is the dual nature of silence. It can be healing or it can be destructive. It can be awkward or amusing, awesome or unpleasant. I don’t like polar opposites, generally, but to me it seems like the power of silence is such that it exists at extremes.
As for the two writings that brought me here, one was Julie Tallard Johnson’s blog post on breaking an unhealthy silence in which abuse and trauma can conceal themselves. The other was the book Conversations on Writing, in which Ursula K. Le Guin mentions the uncomfortable silence that stretches between an interviewer and interviewee badly matched.
Both of these are examples of negative silence, although of different kinds. One made me sigh and one made me laugh, but together they reminded me that there are many kinds of silence. Julie Tallard Johnson writes about silence that needs breaking if healing is to happen; Ursula K. Le Guin writes about silence that envelops incompatible people in proximity.
In my current life, the two most important silences are the one I want to banish, and the one I wish would arrive. The one I want to banish is the one that keeps me from sharing the stories I know some yet-unmet reader probably needs to hear, the stories that frankly I would probably benefit from telling. The silence I wish would arrive is the fallow silence of a peaceful environment, the quiet created by existing where those around you respect your boundaries and your personhood and your space.
Looking back across my life so far, though, I can see I’ve always had an obsession with silence. My favorite memories of childhood are heavily laced with the stillnesses between soft sounds—birdsong, tree-whispers, leaves falling, quiet footsteps, sleeping breath. I always waited to sing my original songs until I was sure no one could hear. My writing flowed best and fastest in the silence of an empty house, or a sleeping one. I did most of my artistic creation when no one was watching. I wrote poems in the sound-insulated music practice rooms at school. Inspired ideas often come to me in a pause — while I stare unseeing at the pages of someone else’s novel, or hold a pen frozen in the air over a half-written sentence, or sit with fingers unmoving over a computer keyboard before they flash back into motion again.
I am not historically one of those people whose bursts of insight come from babbling aloud to a listener or speaking into a recording device. I am not the kind of person who shouts “Eureka!” or “By Jove, I think I’ve got it!” when an interesting concept comes to mind. I am the kind of person who smiles privately in a flush of warm satisfaction and excitement and then swiftly puts pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or brush to canvas, and lets all the (possibly) beautiful things flow out in a muted rush. I love silence. I crave silence. I need silence. I am not the only one.
But even for me, there is silence that is hateful. The silence of oppression, of misunderstanding, of indifference, of shame or of deep unhappy embarrassment. When I’ve experienced these kinds of silence, and I have, I know them for the afflictions they are.
It’s important to have the right kind of silence in your life, and to be wary and wise when encountering the wrong kind of silence. To keep the right balance, of course, we need to be able to differentiate between healthy silence and unhealthy silence, and in some cases the only way to tell which you’re looking at in someone else is to ask. And in some cases, the only way to make sure others know which one applies to the situation is to tell them.
A desire to clarify the good silences and the bad silences is among the reasons I write and feel the need to write. My silences are the same as those with which all humans, and therefore all writers, are enmeshed. There is a silence that nurtures us, and a silence that kills us, and to thrive as writers and people, we must understand both.
Further reading on silence from other sources:
