Into the Silent Spaces

Taking in the sights above Florence, Italy

I’ve been writing most of my life. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I started my first novel. Then, at around fifteen, I plotted out a soap opera (hey, it was the 80s—don’t judge me). I remember having a lot of fun with that—creating an enormous list of characters with wild names, building a fictional town in which my crazy characters interacted in even crazier ways.

In high school, I switched to writing terrible poetry, for which I will remain embarrassed the rest of my life.

In college, of course, I didn’t have time to write. But immediately after graduating, I started up again. A couple novels that stand out are a Seinfeld-esque story about nothing (which goes nowhere); a story about a young woman who hops into her orange VW Beetle with her trusty German Shepherd, Roger, and then…well, I don’t actually remember; and a story based on a book title I came up with when I was in the shower: The Secret Life of Herman Mudge. Problem was, I never did figure out exactly who Herman Mudge was or what his secret life entailed. So, as you’ve probably guessed by now, I never finished that one, either.

The one I came closest to completing was a Robin Hood retelling. I was frustrated because I wanted to read a Robin Hood story that wasn’t a romance, wasn’t violent, and wasn’t written for children. And, way back in the early 2000s, I couldn’t find that story anywhere. So, I decided to write it.

I joined a writing group in Denver, Colorado so I could learn all about the craft of writing, and eventually wrote 80k words. Word-count-wise, that’s absolutely a novel-length manuscript. But the characters are flat, the plot is boring, and all-in-all, it’s not quite what I had in mind. So, it will likely never see the light of day.

It wasn’t until 2022, when I’d written the first few chapters of The Death and Life of Iphigenia that I realized: This is the one. This is the one I’ll finish, and this is the one I’ll publish.

And I did.

I’m an analyzer. I see patterns in every aspect of life, and I analyze history like there’s no tomorrow. So, naturally, I started thinking about why I was able to finish Iphigenia, why I got really close with my Robin Hood retelling, and why none of my former attempts even made it past a handful of pages.

And here’s what I discovered: I love listening to silence. In this big, loud world we live in, much more goes unsaid and unnoticed than all that gets seen and heard.

I thrive in silence, both literally and figuratively. I’d rather drive in a music-free car, read in a TV-free house, and sit in companionable silence with someone I trust than fill all those airwaves with noise. (My husband thinks I’m crazy for the silent driving part, by the way.)

So, I wasn’t surprised when I recognized the same pattern in my stories. I gravitate toward the voices that are muted in history or in fiction. And I want to know more about what happens between big events, or to the characters who are shoved aside while those events unfold.

With my Robin Hood retelling, the strongest voice in the entire 80k words comes from a sister I invented for him. In my version, Alice is by far the smartest and most resourceful character, but she’s ignored and shoved aside because she’s a woman in England in the High Middle Ages.

The Untold Years of Iphigenia

If you’re familiar with the Greek myths involving Iphigenia, you know that, in ancient texts, she’s a sister, daughter, bride, priestess, and pawn. But she’s never a whole person. In Euripides’s play Iphigenia in Aulis, her fate is largely decided by her father, Agamemnon, and the men around him. In Iphigenia Among the Taurians, also by Euripides, her escape is intertwined with the story of her brother, Orestes.

Not only do we see relatively little of Iphigenia’s inner life, but we also have no idea what happened in the many, many years between Aulis and Tauris. We just know that, at Aulis, she’s murdered (or whisked away by Artemis), and then at Tauris, she’s living a miserable life and is ultimately rescued.

But what happens in that space between? You don’t just go from being a young princess whose father tries to murder you to becoming a high priestess stuck in a strange land overnight. What happened during her journey from A to Z?

Similarly, in my short story Aerope, I give voice to a queen who is otherwise a flat, colorless character who exists only to serve specific roles in other stories: She’s the mother of Agamemnon and Menelaus, she’s the deceitful wife of Atreus, she’s the lover of Thyestes. She’s never Aerope, a woman with hopes and feelings, who has opinions about her family and her community and her future.

Exploring those silences is where I thrive. That’s why I was able to complete and publish The Death and Life of Iphigenia. And in my current works in progress (yes, I said works, plural…because why not?) I’m filling in more silent spaces and giving voices to more silenced people.

Because, to me, the most interesting stories aren’t the ones we’ve been told. They’re the ones waiting in the silent spaces.

J. Susanne Wilson writes historical fiction inspired by Greek mythology, exploring overlooked perspectives and the stories hidden between familiar events. She is the award-winning author of The Death and Life of Iphigenia, the first book in the Songs and Lies series.