Larry M. Coleman

I came across this passage in David Damrosch’s Around the World in 80 Books and I immediately knew the feeling:

It is difficult to report the great events of New England: expression is so slight, and those few words which escape us in moments of deep feeling look but meager on the printed page.

—Sarah Orne Jewett

This has happened to me more times than I can count. Often I’ll know a certain section is coming up and it’s going to be a very impactful one. Sometimes I’ll look forward to writing it so I can finally see what it looks like on the page, and other times I’ll almost actively put off writing it because I have to work up the emotional fortitude. Writing big scenes is draining; to get a big payoff, you have to make a big investment.

However, many, many times I’ve finally gotten to those scenes (or gotten to the point where I can’t put them off any longer because I’ve already written everything else around it) and it’s turned out to be so much smaller word-wise than the feeling it contained when I was mentally composing it. Sometimes it’s less than a page, or even only one paragraph. There is one I’ll always remember because it ended up being only one sentence, but it felt like it was going to be a thousand words long. When I come across that sentence, it still hits me with the full impact of all that time I spent thinking about it and what that section would look like before I found out it would only be one sentence in a 500-page novel.

So if you’re writing and it seems like you have so much you want to say but the words just aren’t coming out, maybe the one sentence or the one page you wrote said all there was to say about it. You might not be having a problem: you might have found the solution. You may have, through the act of thinking about it and trying to put it into words, already distilled it into its essence. We don’t smell the petals of the flowers when it’s in perfume, we smell that essence. You discarded the rest of the flower and wrote down the scent. Good for you.

Naturally, this isn’t always going to be the case, or even most of the time. Writing is hard work, and if you can’t get your emotion through to yourself, you won’t be able to get it across to anyone else. As Frost said, no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. Sometimes a big impact takes a big section. On the other hand, a bee isn’t very big, but its tiny stinger can change your whole day.

This is something to keep in mind if you’re feeling frustrated. If you got that emotion across in a dozen words, using a hundred or a thousand isn’t going to make it better. After all, diamonds are pretty when they’re small, but once they start getting too big, they turn into costume jewelry, which isn’t a compliment.