ABSTRACT
Considering silence as a function of writing which enables structure, silence then is never an absence in fiction. Technically, short fictions tend to a manner of writing which is about omissions, ellipsis and suggestion. The short form works best when the reader and author collude in a reading which goes beyond the text. But silence is more than subtext which operates in all good writing, whatever its length. As postmodern practice plays with the notion of the page as a massive gaming board in which writer and reader engage, a fiction becomes a conundrum, a puzzle to be solved. This chapter looks at the role of silence and the unsaid in the short form, where brevity directs how the reader engages with the text. This aims to show the creative potential of silence in the sense of omission or elision within a text.
