THE ART OF SAYING NOTHING

Writers are obsessed with words. We hoard them like shiny coins, polish them, stack them into neat piles of essays and poems, then hand them in to tutors who immediately ask us to “say more.” But here’s a dangerous thought: maybe the best thing a writer can do is shut up.

I do not mean stop writing (though your seminar group would probably thank you if you did). I mean embrace the gaps. The spaces. The silences. The blank stare between two sentences where the reader starts to panic and think, Was that deep, or did I just miss something?

Take Hemingway. He’s famous for the “iceberg theory” — most of the meaning lurks below the surface, unseen. But what’s under there, really? Ice, probably. Or fish. Or maybe just more silence. And yet, whole generations of students have been peer-pressured into nodding seriously at ellipses, convinced that the writer is whispering a secret only they are clever enough to hear.

The truth is: silence is a trick. A good one. It makes you, the reader, do the heavy lifting. It’s like group work where the author vanishes after putting their name on the cover, and you end up writing the whole interpretation yourself. But instead of being annoyed, you feel smart. Genius!

Here’s the fun part: you can use this trick too. Next time you write, try…

• Leaving a sentence unfinished. (Your tutor will lean in closer, desperate for closure.)

• Breaking lines too early.

• Putting in a dramatic one-word paragraph.

Like this.

See? You are still reading, waiting for something to happen. It’s addictive.

So yes, words are nice. But nothing — if you dress it up right — can be even nicer. The Broad exists so we can test these things out, so we can learn to be both loud and quiet, both obvious and slippery. To say something but also nothing at all.

And if your seminar tutor disagrees, just stare at them in silence. They will call it “provocative.”