White Space and Silence

I am a writer. I am a reader. I am a wife. By extension, I am a multi-tasker. With all that is going on in my life, I long for white space and silence.

Open a book, preferably a novel. Look at how the words are laid out on the page. Do you see long sentences, blocks of text in dense paragraphs? Or do you see punchy dialogue, action instead of dialogue tags, single word sentences? Given my druthers, I'd druther have short and punchy instead of dense text no matter how skillful the writer. When punchy and dense combine, I'm happy as a pig in, well, you get the idea.

I once wrote a paragraph that went like this: "Cope."

Nothing more. Punchy. Pithy, Brief. In that one word I hoped to evoke a sense of finality, of surrender, in an argument. Before and after that paragraph were a series of short sentences. I gave the reader a place to breathe, to sit back and relax. After an intense scene, I as a writer needed to step back too.

White space on a page works for me the same way silence does. My favorite time of day is that half hour before dawn when the only things awake in the world are birds and me. I live where I'm generally far away from traffic, unless it's jet skis on the lake where my house is. But, that's the stuff for other posts. Maybe.

I need silence to meditate and write as I start my day. Silence encourages me to clear my mind of any leftovers from the day before. At times I lie still in bed, concentrate on my breathing and relax. When my feet hit the floor, I'm off and running.

I seek silence throughout the day. I need a screen when I write, because my pen doesn't move as fast as my fingers do on the keyboard. I don't need distractions. I don't always need to know what's going on in the world, much as I would love to keep CNN on. I'm an unrepentant news junkie.

I don't need to check in with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Goodreads. (Now that I have a board on Pinterest, I guess I need to add that to my list of places I don't need to go every minute of every day.) Friends may whine when I'm off FB for several hours. They'll have to cope, because I can't be online with them and still hit my deadlines for my novels.

So, if I'm out of screen touch for a few hours, I'm writing or editing or meditating. I'm not ignoring you. I need time for me to get my work done. If you can't wait until I'm back online, I have only one word for you.

"Cope."

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Betsy Ashton is the author of Mad Max, Unintended Consequences, and Uncharted Territory, A Mad Max Mystery, which is now available in e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.