I don’t experience quite the way a hearing person might imagine it.  For me, quiet isn’t an empty space waiting to be filled with sound. It has movement, expression, feeling, and its own kind of language.

As a Deaf woman, I have learned to pay attention to what is happening around me in ways that may be different from someone who hears. I watch faces, I notice expressions and body language. I see when someone’s eyes tell a different story from the words they are speaking. Maybe that is one reason I became a writer. I have always been an observer.

When I write, I often see the story happening before I find the words for it. I picture how a character enters a room, what their hands are doing, where their eyes wander, or how their expression changes when something hasn’t been said. Those small details matter to me.

Writing Between Two Worlds

Being Deaf in a predominately hearing world has also given me experiences with communication, misunderstanding, connection, and belonging. There are times when communication flows easily and other times when it doesn’t. There are moments of being included and moments of realizing that a conversation has continued without me. Those experiences stay with you.

They have also taught me something about storytelling: people don’t always understand one another, even when they speak the same language. That space between what someone means and what another person understands can hold an entire story.

Deaf Characters Can Simply Be Characters

As I continue writing fiction, I want Deaf characters to have room to simply live. They can fall in love, They can make mistakes. They can solve mysteries, keep secrets, argue with friends, get angry, laugh, take risks, make terrible decisions, and occasionally surprise even the person writing them.

Their deafness is part of who they are, but it doesn’t have to be the only reason their story exists. I think that matters.

The Stories I See

Perhaps writing will always be visual for me in many ways. I see the mountains before I describe them. I see the expression on a character’s face before I know what they will say. I see the trees moving, the light changing, a hand reaching across a table, or someone turning away before I understand why that moment belongs in the story. Then I try to find the words.

That is one of the things I love about writing. A blank page begins with nothing. And slowly, a world appears. Maybe that is what writing in the quiet means to me. Not the absence of something. But paying attention to everything that is already there.