Day 158: Quiet

Something I struggle to get across in my stories is the lack of a thing. Quiet spaces, the pauses between dialogue, or a big empty space. These things are hard to convey well because just telling the reader that something isn't makes them immediately think about what is, or at least that's what happens when I'm reading. It's kinda like saying to someone 'don't think about elephants.' Similarly, 'the room was quiet' makes me think about the sounds I can still hear in the room. I have tinnitus too, so if I try to imagine true silence I just can't really. So the question is, how can I make a room feel quiet without outright stating that it is? I run into this a lot in my writing and so far I've only come up with one solution.

I think the best way to do this is approach from the opposite direction, since that's what my brain will do anyway. When I want a room to be quiet, instead I add some small details about what a character can hear in the room. The small coughing and sniffling noises that can be heard from a crowd. The electric buzzing of a fridge or an old lightbulb. AC running on low. If I want an extremely quiet room, maybe the character can hear their own heartbeat, or if an extreme is necessary what about a room like this?

This is an anechoic chamber built by Microsoft, and it is the quietest place in the world. People who've sat in this room for a while report that they can hear their own spit moving around in their mouths, the sound of their bones sliding against one another, and the digestive processes going on in their gut. Apparently, most people find this rather unpleasant. Now that's quiet, but notice that none of them tried to describe the quiet by a lack of something. It only feels most silent when the things that can be heard are tiny.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley