by Khoa Nguyễn
We often hear the familiar writing advice that story thrives on conflict, that characters must speak, act, and push the plot forward through decisive motion. Dialogue is praised as the engine of tension, and silence is treated as a void, something to be filled, avoided, or broken.
But this understanding assumes that characters always have the ability, the safety, or even the language to articulate what they feel. It assumes that speech is the natural state of a person under pressure. And it overlooks how often silence is not absence, but presence, a force that shapes lives as powerfully as any spoken word.
If we accept that silence can be meaningful, then why do we so often write as if only sound matters?
I suspect we cling to dialogue because it gives us clarity. When characters speak, we can judge them, understand them, categorize them. Speech feels like control. Silence, on the other hand, resists interpretation. It asks the reader to sit with uncertainty, to consider what cannot be said, or what has been taken away.
Some of the most resonant literature emerges not from what characters declare, but from what they cannot bring themselves to voice.
Consider Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. For much of the novel, Celie’s silence is not a choice but a condition imposed on her. Her letters, written privately, addressed to God, become the only space where she can speak. Her silence in the world is not emptiness; it is the weight of survival. The novel asks us to read her quiet not as passivity, but as endurance. Her eventual voice is powerful precisely because of the silence that preceded it.
Or take Yiyun Li’s story “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” where the strained relationship between a father and daughter is defined by what they refuse to say. Their conversations are polite, even mundane, yet the emotional truth of the story lives in the gaps. The silence between them is not a lack of communication,it is the communication.
Writers might ask themselves:
What does my character gain by staying silent?
What do they risk by speaking?
What truths live in the spaces between their words?
Silence can be a shield, a wound, a strategy, a punishment, a cultural inheritance. It can be chosen or forced. It can be temporary or lifelong. And when we treat silence as an active element rather than a passive one, our stories deepen.
Sometimes silence is a metaphor for something larger. In Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the narrator writes letters to a mother who cannot read. The silence between them is not a failure but a condition of their relationship, a reminder of migration, trauma, and the limits of language itself. The novel’s emotional force comes from the tension between what is said and what will never be heard.
In other stories, silence becomes a kind of fate. A character may try to speak, to confess, to warn, but circumstances intervene, a missed moment, a closed door, a cultural expectation. The unsaid becomes the story’s turning point.
We might think of silence in two ways. One is the imposed silence, the kind that comes from power, fear, or oppression. The other is the chosen silence, the kind that comes from reflection, restraint, or love. Both can shape a narrative as profoundly as any spoken confrontation.
Characters do not become less compelling because they are quiet. In fact, they often become more so. Silence invites the reader to lean in, to listen differently, to participate in meaning‑making.
And perhaps that is the deeper truth: silence is not the absence of story. It is just another way of telling it.
Art by Saatchi Art, “Silence and Humility“
About the Author
Born and raised in Hanoi, Vietnam, Khoa is currently spending her first year studying in the United States, where she has unexpectedly fallen in love with the country’s people, landscapes, and stories. Her writing is shaped by the blend of home and new horizons, and she hopes to continue exploring identity, place, and belonging through her work.