When I sat down to write this story, I didn’t think of it as speculative fiction at all. I thought of it as silence. Not metaphorical silence, but real—the kind that follows you out of a temple or settles in the car ride home after visiting a gravesite. That’s the emotional space this story was trying to inhabit. Not the moment of mourning, but the one that comes right after, when you start folding grief back into your daily movements like laundry.

I wanted to write something where nothing really happens, but the reader still feels like something has shifted by the end. No twist. No escalation. Just the slow tension of trying to name an emotion that doesn’t want to be spoken out loud.

The setting did most of the heavy lifting. The bridge wasn’t a plot device—it was a metaphor, of course, but more than that, it gave me structure. A bridge is about passage, about being between things. It gave the story a shape without needing an arc. It let the protagonist stand still while the world moved quietly around her.

At first, I made the mistake of trying to dramatize that stillness. I added flashes of magic. A mysterious figure crossing the bridge. A line of whispered dialogue from the other side. None of it worked. Every flourish cheapened the weight of the silence I was trying to preserve. I had to learn, again, that implied magic is often more powerful than explicit magic. That’s where the weight lives—in suggestion, not spectacle.

The story is built on restraint. I had to resist the instinct to explain the character’s grief. I stripped out every sentence that began with “She thought about…” or “She remembered when…” and let the environment do the emotional work instead. The incense, the food wrappers, the hush of the market—all of those became vessels for what she couldn’t say out loud. That’s one of the most useful tricks I know: when the character can’t speak, let the setting speak for them.

Another deliberate choice was to leave the character unnamed. That wasn’t just a stylistic decision—it was an act of focus. Names, in a story like this, draw attention to individual identity. I didn’t want that. I wanted the reader to feel like this could be anyone. Any daughter. Any grandchild. Any person carrying a grief they can’t quite name.

If you’re a writer working on something quiet, I’ll offer this: don’t be afraid of slow pacing—but understand that when your plot slows down, your prose has to carry more weight. Stillness isn’t the absence of motion; it’s a different kind of motion, internal and subtle and deeply reliant on specificity. If you want to hold someone’s attention with a whisper, every word has to be placed with intention.

There’s a temptation to call stories like this “small,” but I don’t think they are. They’re just internal. They don’t beg for your attention—they wait for it. And if they’re built well enough, the reader comes closer.

Writing Challenge

Write a story where the emotional climax is completely internal. Let the protagonist take no visible action at all. Instead, use environmental detail—scent, sound, light, texture—to show us what they’re feeling. No dialogue. No flashbacks. Just presence.

Make the reader feel the ache without ever naming it.

Questions for Reflection

When you write about grief, are you trying to explain it—or let the reader live inside it?

What sensory detail carries the most emotional weight for you personally? Do you use it enough in your fiction?

How do you pace silence? How do you make stillness matter?