Margaret Whitford

Stillness, Silence, and the Writing Process

When I think of silence and its relationship to writing, I think first of the essential role of stillness in my writing process. Stillness allows me to find a calm not accessible elsewhere. It is a quiet that leads to reflection and increases my capacity to listen to an internal voice, one that is not confused by language, which can obscure as much as it illuminates.

As someone accustomed to using her analytical skills to understand a problem, I am tempted sometimes to reach conclusions about whatever central concern is driving my work before the work itself reveals what I need to understand. Those premature assumptions may be temporarily satisfying, but are rarely valid.

My internal voice is more reflective than my analytical one and more open to possibility. Sometimes I think of that voice as my intuition, my muse, or my subconscious trying to be heard. That voice speaks to me in different ways, but most often it urges me to look in another direction, to recognize something I have not yet seen or have been avoiding.

It is the voice that asks me to pause and reexamine what I’d taken as truth. To the extent wisdom is accessible to me, it is found in silence.

Using Silence on the Page to Shape Meaning and Rhythm

Silence also plays an important role in the written text because it changes or stops the writing’s forward momentum, if only for a breath or two. When I use silence in my writing, I almost always approach doing so intuitively. I do not recognize its effectiveness until later in the writing process, and most often, when I read the text aloud to myself.

Both my parents were good storytellers, my father an excellent one. And what made his stories and jokes so entertaining had less to do with content and far more with timing. He always knew when to pause, creating that one beat of silence, and that heightened the interest of his audience.

I like to think that in my writing, I may be drawing on the remembered music of my father’s stories.

I vary sentence length and structure to change the rhythm of the text. For example, following a longer passage with a one-word sentence stops the reader on that word, asking her for a moment of recognition. That one word becomes a kind of ending note. Dashes, which I have to be careful not to overuse, slow the movement of the text, creating a more reflective or intimate mood.

I use section breaks that appear as white space on the page to introduce another kind of silence. This silence is not mute but communicates something important to the reader—an upcoming shift in time period, perspective, or scene. These section breaks are also an invitation to the reader to pause and consider the text that has preceded the white space.

What Memoir Leaves Unsaid: Silence, Restraint, and the Reader

One of the more challenging choices the writer of memoir must make is what to exclude. A memoir is not the examination of an entire life; it is an exploration of some aspect of that life. In this case, the relevant silence relates to what does not find its way to the page.

For example, in my memoir, The History We Carry, I focused on my mother and our relationship. My relationship with my father was complicated as well, and he was a fascinating man. But I knew he was not a central character in the way my mother needed to be, despite his influence on me, on my mother, and within our family.

He needed to be part of the memoir but could not dominate it. At the same time, having included him as a character, I did my best to be fair so that what emerged was a complex man and one not easily dismissed or judged.

Perhaps the most important effect of silence on the page is to make room for the reader’s response, both emotional and intellectual. For example, I use sensory details and evocative description to reveal my own emotional response to past experience without labeling that response. I respect the reader’s intelligence by trusting her to understand the material without explicit guidance. The writer’s restraint creates an opening for the reader.

And finally, I remind myself that my task is to tell my story as truthfully as possible, while recognizing that I cannot control how it will be received.

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My memoir, “The History We Carry: A Daughter’s Memoir,” will be released in June 2026 by SheWritesPress.

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