: Is muteness appearing without explicit reason acceptable? In one of my stories, my main character was once able to speak, but after being alone for 3 or 4 years in his early 20's without speaking

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Loneliness can do anything. It can make a person mute without any reason. What our subconscious mind decides strongly, it can do. It doesn't require any reason.

So, your character is apt.

Thanks.

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Speaking as a physician, I find it implausible at best. As a professional writer, I find it an inadequately developed motivation. I would urge you to think quite a bit more about why such a profound life change would happen to someone. If you can't come up with a really convincing reason, then why is it in your story? In my opinion, it's not merely the fact of his muteness that should play a part in the story, but the reason for the muteness that should have something to do with the heart of the story.

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Is the point of the story to realistically discuss how this person became mute, in some clinical sense, or to spin a story around the initial premise that he is mute?

If the story is intended to be a discussion of medical or psychological realities, than this is the wrong place to ask. You should be asking this on a medical web site, or studying books on the brain and language development.

But if the point of your story is just to explore what happens to this character after he becomes mute, how it affects his life or whatever, than I wouldn't worry too much about how realistic it is. Just through in a couple of lines about how the psychological trauma caused him to become mute or how that section of his brain atrophied from disuse or whatever. If it's important for your story for X to happen, then just make up some maybe-plausible-sounding explanation and do it.

Writers do this all the time. As premises for a story go, this would be far from the most implausible thing that a writer has ever tried to pull. I sincerely doubt that it is possible to travel in time and there's lot of good physics that says it's impossible to travel faster than light, but characters in science fiction do these things all the time and my technical doubts do nothing to diminish the entertainment value of the story. I find it implausible that Perry Mason only gets murder cases with innocent clients and that the person who really did it always breaks down and confesses in court. I don't believe that the thin and sexy little girls on Charlie's Angels can really beat up not just any man in the house, but every man in the house simultaneously: Women I've met who were tough enough to beat up any man in sight also tended to look tougher than any man in sight. Etc. If the story is entertaining, readers will accept an implausible premise to get it rolling.

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The issue is that you have your character losing the ability to speak as a young adult. There has to be some kind of trauma (physical or emotional) for that to happen. The neurological pathways for language are formed starting in infancy (they really get going around 9-10 months) and continue for several years. If your character knows how to talk at 20, he's not going to abruptly lose the capacity just because he didn't use it for several years. It's not like walking where you lose muscle tone.

(Also, I don't know about you, but I talk to myself all the time even when there's no one else around. I laugh out loud at things I read, I call the cat, I sing along with music, I talk back to the TV, I yell obscenities if I hurt myself, I mutter if I'm looking for something. Being in isolation for several years does not by itself mean I won't speak for several years.)

Now, there's a difference between losing the ability to speak (he wants to, but can't) and losing the desire to speak (he can, but doesn't want to).

It might be more interesting if the reason for your character's muteness is a mystery which the other characters (and the reader) have to figure out. There either is some trauma which makes him afraid to speak, or he took some kind of vow of silence so he's choosing not to speak. That could be political, religious, cultural, or just personal persnicketiness.

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I've seen so many books and movies with similar reasons for people to lose their ability to speak that, in a mere reader point of view, I would have no reason at all to doubt that it could happen. I don't think many readers would doubt it could happen also.

But I think if you really want to know for sure, research is the way. There's a nice -- and helpful book -- titled Writer's Guide to Psychology: How to Write Accurately About Psychological Disorders, Clinical Treatment & Human Behavior that I believe could do the trick.

I have a psychology degree (although I graduated 1999) so I just wanted this as a backup. I found it would be perfectly accessible to the layman, making all mental health and psychological issues easy to understand and imagine. If you write about this subject, or are interested in brushing up skills to work as a carer in mental health, you could do worse than buying this book.

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