When Silence Becomes the Enemy

 

There is a peculiar kind of dread that only appears when nothing is happening.

Not when things are bad. Not when the news is terrible. Not even when the world is clearly going off the rails. Those moments, oddly enough, have shape. They have focus. They give the mind something to press against.

But when the phone doesn’t ring...
When the email doesn’t arrive...
When the diagnosis is still “pending...”
When the world seems to pause without explanation...

That’s when the silence starts to hum.

Most of us like to think we fear bad news. In reality, we often fear uncertainty more. Bad news hurts, but it also clarifies. It tells you where you stand. It gives you something solid to respond to. Silence does the opposite. Silence invites imagination, and imagination is rarely kind.

In real life, this shows up everywhere.

You’re waiting to hear back about a job. Every hour stretches. Every notification feels loaded. You replay the interview in your head, looking for clues that were never meant to exist.

You’re waiting on medical results. You find yourself half-wishing they’d just tell you it’s bad, because at least then you’d know what you’re dealing with. The waiting becomes its own illness.

You’re in a relationship that has gone quiet. No arguments. No reassurance. Just a thinning of contact that feels worse than a fight. When there’s conflict, you know the terrain. When there’s silence, you don’t even know which direction you’re facing.

The human mind hates empty space. When there’s no narrative supplied, we invent one.

This is not a flaw. It’s a survival instinct. We are pattern-making creatures. We want causality. We want stories. And when the world doesn’t give us one, we build our own, often from scraps of fear and half-remembered signals.

That instinct doesn’t stop at the personal level. It scales upward.

In politics, silence is rarely neutral. When leaders go quiet, when institutions delay, when official language becomes vague or noncommittal, people don’t relax. They tense up. The absence of information becomes information in itself.

This is why “no news” is so often interpreted as “bad news being prepared.”

Governments understand this, which is why silence is sometimes used deliberately. Delay buys time. Ambiguity defers accountability. If nothing is said, nothing can be challenged. But the cost is psychological. People fill the gap with suspicion, rumor, and anxiety.

In that sense, silence becomes a form of power.

It keeps people alert, off-balance, and mentally occupied. They argue among themselves. They speculate. They polarize. All without a single concrete statement being made.

We see the same mechanism in modern media cycles. Outrage and disaster are easier to process than limbo. A clear villain is easier to respond to than an invisible process. This is why politics increasingly operates in a state of permanent emergency. The moment the noise stops, people start asking uncomfortable questions.

Silence invites scrutiny. Noise distracts from it.

Which brings us, inevitably, to fiction.

Writers often assume that momentum comes from action. From events. From things happening. But some of the most powerful tension in storytelling comes from waiting. From withheld information. From the sense that something is coming, but you don’t yet know what shape it will take.

Done well, this kind of narrative silence is unbearable in the best way.

"Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait." Charles Dickens 

Think about how often the most gripping moments in a story are not the explosions, but the pauses before them. The unanswered question. The letter not yet opened. The knock at the door that hasn’t come.

The reason this works is the same reason silence unsettles us in real life. The reader’s mind fills the gap. Anticipation does the work that spectacle cannot.

But here’s the trap.

Many writers panic in these quiet stretches. They fear the reader will be bored. So they inject noise. A sudden argument. An unnecessary twist. A dramatic interruption that exists solely to “keep things moving.”

In doing so, they undermine their own tension.

Silence in fiction only works if it is loaded. If the reader understands what might be at stake. If the quiet exists in relation to something already established. Without that context, silence is just emptiness.

This is where real life teaches us something useful about craft.

We only dread silence when we care about the outcome.

If you’re waiting to hear back from something that doesn’t matter, the silence barely registers. If you’re waiting on something that could change your life, every quiet moment feels amplified.

The same is true on the page.

A quiet chapter works because the reader knows what hangs in the balance. A still scene works because it sits between cause and effect. The writer doesn’t need to shout. The reader is already leaning forward.

Good writers learn to trust this.

They understand that not every page needs an event. Some pages need pressure. Some need restraint. Some need the courage to let the silence stretch just a little longer than feels comfortable.

In fact, one of the marks of a confident writer is their willingness to let nothing happen for a moment and trust that it will mean something.

The same principle applies thematically.

Stories that are constantly loud often have nothing to say. Stories that allow space often carry more weight. Silence gives meaning somewhere to land.

This doesn’t mean avoiding conflict. It means understanding rhythm. It means recognizing that drama is not a constant state, but a contrast.

And this circles back to life again.

When everything is noise, we become numb. When everything is crisis, nothing feels real. Sometimes the most honest thing is to sit in the not-knowing and admit that this, too, is part of the human experience.

Waiting. Uncertainty. The stretch of time where nothing resolves and nothing explodes.

It’s uncomfortable because it strips away our illusions of control. It reminds us that we are not always in charge of the next beat of the story.

But it’s also where reflection happens. It’s where meaning forms. It’s where we decide who we are before the next piece of news arrives.

In writing, as in life, silence is not the absence of story.

It is the space in which story gathers itself.

And learning to live with that – on the page and off it – may be one of the most difficult, and most necessary, skills we ever develop.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell