Writing insights worth re-posting:

Silence, too, is a tool in the wordsmith’s toolbox–perhaps the most potent of all in an art wrought by and from words. The caesura, a moment of silence in music and a metrical pause in poetry, allows readers (and musicians, and writers) to catch their breath. This pause also allows emotion to flow in: fear, compassion, love, transcendence. Moreover, it gives the reader the chance to co-create the writer’s world, filling in what the writer hasn’t said with one’s own imagination.

Leaving something unsaid is a mark of either artistry or ineptitude.

A well at Storm King Mountain, New York (ooh, if it were only bottomless!) As the poison Hamlet has swallowed starts to take its lethal effect, he gasps out his last words: “The rest is silence.” He won’t learn the outcome of events he’d helped set into motion, for death’s quietus has enfolded him. Silence, […]

via The Rest Is Silence: Leaving Things Up to the Reader’s Imagination — Valor and Compassion