A Love Letter to Silence, Side-Eye, and Stories That Breathe – From Your Loving Editor with Rabies 

I’m gonna say something, and you might not like it. But it needs to be said.

Some of your characters are… talking too much. And you need to tone them down.

Not all the way. Not forever. I’m not asking for silence or subtlety. I’m asking for range. For texture. For a little bit of grace in the quiet moments. And maybe, just maybe, a pause where the characters stop talking and actually exist, like beings with bodies. Not just sentient voiceovers trapped in a group chat.

Lately I’ve been editing a string of stories that all share one thing in common: they read like they were written for the stage. Every character is delivering lines like they’re auditioning for a revival of Rent and forgot this scene is actually set in a living room, not a Broadway balcony. The emotions are huge, the spotlight is metaphorical, and apparently no one ever needs to sip water, pace in the room, or blink.

I’m not saying this to be harsh. I’m saying it because I want the story to land. I want it to feel real. I believe in your story, and I want it to breathe,
 

…not just recite.

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Dialogue Shouldn’t Do All the Work

If the bones of your plot are held together entirely by dialogue, that’s not a good foundation. That’s a paper straw in boiling soup. It’s going to get soggy, and then everything collapses, and you’re left wondering why the emotional climax feels like a table read at a start-up retreat hosted by a guy named Chad who sells crypto guides on LinkedIn.

Look, we all love a clever exchange. A zippy comeback. A devastating confession that leaves us curled in a blanket questioning our last three relationships. 

But when your entire scene is built like a tennis match of quotations – serve, return, serve, return – it starts to feel like I’m watching a live transcription of someone’s Facebook Messenger DMs, complete with thumbs-up reacts and unhinged typing indicators.

The thing about writing, the magic of it, is that you have everything. You’re not limited to what can be filmed, said out loud, or acted. You have access to the full spectrum: thought, space, memory, sensation, contradiction, ghosts, bugs, weather. A psychic nosebleed in a 7-Eleven parking lot. A cursed mirror in grandma’s attic. All of it. 

Why would you reduce that to chatter?

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Words Aren’t Even the Main Way We Communicate

Here’s the science part, and I’ll be quick, because we’re both artists and allergic to math:

• 55% of communication is made up of body language. 
• 38%? Tone of voice.
• Only 7% is actual words.

SEVEN. PERCENT. That’s the same percentage of battery I had when I made the worst decision of my dating life.

So when you hand me a scene that’s 90% dialogue, what you’re giving me is a story told in the least effective format for meaning.

And yes, I said meaning, not plot, because while your characters might be moving through a situation, I have no idea how they feel. They’re too busy describing it like tour guides on a broken-down bus.

Imagine two people having a fight. Not an argument – a real fight, where years of resentment and grief and repression come to a boil. Now imagine they do it like this:

“I’m angry,” she said, arms crossed like a human barricade, voice sharp enough to draw blood. “But not the type of angry that burns out. The kind that sits. Simmers. Unfed, but never forgotten.”

He leaned back like the weight of her words physically pushed him. “And I’m disappointed. Not in you. In the way things turned out. In the fact that we had all the ingredients and still made poison.”

She blinked. Once. Twice. “So what? We just list our feelings now? You go, then I go, and maybe by the end we’ll accidentally fix what’s broken?”

“No,” he said. “But if I don’t say it out loud, I might start believing none of it mattered.”

Her mouth opened, then shut. “I hate that we’re still doing this. Still throwing adjectives at each other and hoping one will feel like closure.”

“Better than silence.”

“Is it?”

Do you see what I see?

Reading this felt like getting emotionally waterboarded by a Pinterest board of therapy quotes.

In real life, she’s pacing the room. He’s not making eye contact. She reaches for a mug she doesn’t even want and sets it down without drinking. He flinches when she says his name. She doesn’t cry, but her voice cracks. He calls her “babe” and instantly regrets it. There’s a silence that hums like a live wire.

That’s the scene. Not the literal words. The feeling is in the world, not the sentences. You are not the court stenographer. You are the entire weather system. Act like it.

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The Floating Head Syndrome

When dialogue takes over a scene, something truly tragic happens. The world dies. Characters stop being tethered to a location, a moment, a context. They become floating heads. Mouths in a void. You get that weird stagey vibe – two people sitting in a white room that only exists because the author forgot to build anything around them. 

(From now on, I will be referring to “tragic” as the opposite of “magic,” and no one can stop me.)

I call it the IKEA Showroom Effect: all setup, no soul.

And when that happens, you don’t just lose immersion. You lose intimacy.
 

The reader starts to feel like an eavesdropper, not a witness. There’s no presence. No sense of breath or temperature or light. Just voices in a jar, echoing back without a body to hold them.

A great scene makes the reader feel like they’re there. Boots on the ground. Sweat on the back of their neck. Dialogue alone can’t do that. Not even the best-written, most devastating lines. Because it’s incomplete.

You need movement and context. You need time to pass. You need wind in the trees. You need the deafening sound of silence when no one speaks, when the air itself starts to ache.

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When I Knew I Had to Write This

There’s a book I read recently – or rather, tried to read. It was everywhere. TikTok screamed about it. The haunted horror girlies were obsessed. People were calling it “brilliant,” “visceral,” “disturbing in the best way.” The book was Incidents Around the House.

And listen. I wanted to love it. I wanted to be disturbed. My husband bought it for me. I carved out a night. I lit a candle, made myself coffee at 8 in the evening (why didn’t I just get a knife?), played lofi in the background and got comfy.

Five pages in, I was worried.

By page twenty, I was pacing.

By page thirty, I was checking how much longer the chapter was. I felt trapped in a meeting that could have been an email (I would definitely ignore.)

Scene after scene. Page after page. Endless conversations. Entire monologues. Adults explaining the psychology of divorce to a child with the tone of a TED Talk on parental alienation. There was no tension. Just explanation.

I felt like I was being held hostage in a counseling office that served vibes and trauma with a side of interpretive dance.

I didn’t finish it. And I don’t feel bad about it.

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You Are Allowed toPause the Dialaogue

A reminder for the writers out there: you’re the one in control.

You can pause the dialogue. You can insert a beat of silence. You can describe the dirty ashtray in the middle of the coffee table and how each extinguished cigarette butt was the culprit of a broken marriage. You can let the camera pan out. You can linger on the air between your characters. You are not legally obligated to make every scene sound like an over-rehearsed high school drama club audition – filled with dialogue, and wasted effort on super cool props.

You don’t need your characters to say every thought that crosses their mind. Sometimes the most powerful thing a character can do is say nothing and still be understood. Through their actions. Through their avoidance. Through the dent they leave in the mattress after they’ve gotten up and left.

There’s nothing weak about quiet. In fact, it’s one of the most confrontational choices a writer can make. The pause between words, the moment that lingers just a second too long. That’s where the real tension hides.

You don’t need a monologue to rip someone’s chest open. Sometimes all it takes is a glance that doesn’t land, a hand that doesn’t reach back, or a clock ticking in the background while everything else falls apart. Let the setting do the speaking. Let the emotion leak into the floorboards. Let the reader feel like they’ve stepped into something private and unbearably human, even if no one says a thing.

Because the best writing isn’t about what’s said. It’s about what’s felt.

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The Actual Tip: Stop Talking

If you skimmed this post and just want the advice, fine. Here it is:

• Don’t rely on dialogue to carry every scene.
• Only 7% of real-life communication happens through actual words. The rest is body language, vocal tone, environmental context, and all the unspoken things we pretend don’t matter but definitely do.
• Remember that your characters live in bodies. Let them use them. Let them itch. Let them sweat. Let them fumble for their keys and stare at the floor and pick lint off their sleeves instead of answering the question they were just asked.
• Emotion isn’t just verbal. Use silence. Use the weather. Use a cracked phone screen. Use the absence of sound like a knife. Use contradiction like banana ketchup – generously, and with chaos.
• Cut at least one conversation from your draft. I dare you. Matter of fact, make it ten. 
• Make your characters earn their lines. Give their silence some teeth.

And if you’re still writing your characters like they’re auditioning for an audio drama on NPR, please understand: you’re not writing a novel. You’re writing a podcast script. That’s fine. But at least say that.

Your characters don’t have to be your mouthpieces. They don’t need to narrate their grief or over-explain their guilt like they’re on a reality TV confessional. If they’re hurting, show me the chipped mug they can’t bring themselves to throw out. Show me the way they scroll through their call log and hesitate before tapping on a name. Let them avoid the conversation. Let them say the wrong thing, then say nothing at all.

Readers are smart – they’ll feel what’s been left unsaid. And in that silence, in that restraint, the story gains a heartbeat.

Not because someone told us how it feels, but because we were allowed to feel it ourselves.

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