And there is the silence of this morning/which I have broken with my pen…
From Silence, by Billy Collins
Greetings, writers—
In one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s galleries of musical instruments is a 2,000-year-old bell from Japan that was built to be mute.
Known as dōtaku, clapperless bells such as these were buried in the ground, often on hilltops, to bless the nearby crops. (That’s historians’ best guess, anyway.)
You could play John Cage’s 4′33″ on a clapperless bell, because the score of that particular composition instructs the performer not to play for the entire length of the piece. 1
And here is a poem inspired by 4′33″, or perhaps John Cage himself:
(I love that—a very nearly silent poem!)
Sometimes you might find yourself choosing silence over sentences, too.
Maybe, when you’re writing a story, you don’t offer a lot of background information, or tell what your characters were like before the story began.
Maybe you don’t reveal what your characters are thinking about what’s happening to them.
Maybe you “write the islands” and leave out the transitional moments.
Maybe you use a lot of white space.
Maybe you end a few sentences with ellipses.
Maybe you put down your pencil and just stare out a window.
Today, think about silence and how it plays a role in your writing.
Then write a scene of silence, however you would like to interpret it. Might it be a scene of natural beauty, with not a human in sight? Or might it be two people at a dinner table, not saying what needs to be said? Or….?
Happy writing—
Emily
“Now, Earle, don’t you think that John has gone too far this time?” his mother asked Earle Brown, another composer, after a 4’ 33” performance.