As well as writing The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Scott Fitzgerald demonstrated his all-round brilliance with the following quotation:
"One of the privileges of dialogue is silence."
This is deliciously counter-intuitive, because when you think about dialogue you think about people talking, you think about what they are saying, how they are saying it and why. But stop for a moment, and consider....
What about the things that people aren't saying? If you start to pursue this as an idea it can take you into interesting areas of secrecy, duplicity, hypocrisy, manipulativeness, slyness, and so on. It leads you to oblique and murky waters. It can also help you further your plot: why are they not saying these things? Are they frightened? Passive-aggressive? Already you're doing character work as well!
Silence can take you to the spaces in between, where unexpected things happen. It is where storytelling stops being literal and becomes something else more enigmatic and interesting. It can be unusual, tender, dangerous or mundane. Because it isn't defined by words but by context, it can be anything you want -- that is its privilege: use it.
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