The Poverty of Your Expression

When you sit down to write…you think, ah, yes, the entire world and all its strange nuances, and subtleties, and inexpressibilities are about to surge through my arm into the pencil I’m holding. And then you look down at what you’ve written and it’s something like, And so he walked to the grocery store…. That feeling of the richness of the world and the poverty of your means of expression is one of the inescapable features of writing fiction. One finds that one’s thought is much more conventionalized than one would have guessed.

DEBORAH EISENBERG