What to Expand, What to Compress: A Writer’s Sense of Proportion

One of the skills that separates mature writing from early drafts is a sense of proportion. This is the ability to recognize what deserves space on the page and what must remain compressed, implied, or passed over quickly. Proportion shapes pacing, emphasis, and emotional weight. It governs whether a scene breathes or stalls, and whether a paragraph opens something essential or merely circles it.

Writers rarely arrive at this skill through theory alone. Proportion is learned through years of reading, drafting, misjudging, and revising. Early drafts often linger on the wrong moments. They devote pages to setup and rush through the emotional turn. They explain what the reader can already feel and skim past what needs time to register. Developing proportion means learning to sense where the energy of a piece truly resides.

Classic literature offers clear examples of this calibration. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert famously condenses years of Emma’s married life into brief passages while lingering with almost forensic care on moments of desire, disappointment, and fantasy. The balance of the novel depends on this choice. The marriage itself is not the center of gravity. Emma’s interior longings are. Flaubert’s restraint elsewhere allows those inner scenes to carry their full weight.

A similar discipline appears in The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway summarizes entire relationships in a paragraph, then devotes extended attention to a single afternoon in a hotel suite or a brief reunion between Gatsby and Daisy. Fitzgerald understood that the novel’s meaning lived in these charged moments, not in exhaustive social chronologies. The compression elsewhere sharpens the intensity of what remains expanded.

Contemporary literature continues this tradition, often with even greater minimalism. In her Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk reduces her narrator’s own life to a series of partial disclosures while giving full space to the voices of others. The disproportion is intentional. The emotional structure of these novels emerges from what is withheld as much as from what is shown. The reader is asked to notice absence and restraint as meaningful choices.

Similarly, in Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro treats some of the most devastating implications of the story with remarkable understatement. Major revelations are delivered almost casually, while everyday routines and memories receive sustained attention. The novel’s power comes from this imbalance. The ordinary is allowed to accumulate until it becomes unbearable.

For developing writers, these decisions rarely feel intuitive. Many drafts suffer from what might be called narrative overexposure. Writers explain a character’s motivations too often, recount backstory in full, or extend scenes beyond their natural life. This often comes from uncertainty. When a writer does not yet trust the material, they compensate by adding more words. In manuscript consultation, a literary coach can identify proportional distortions that the writer is too close to see. A coach might notice that a single paragraph carries the emotional heart of the piece and suggest expanding it into a full scene. They might also point out that a lovingly detailed chapter actually needs to be compressed to move the story forward.

Effective critique does not impose proportion from the outside. Instead, it helps the writer recognize where their own energy already lies. A coach listens for urgency, hesitation, repetition, and strain. These signals often indicate places where proportion is misaligned. When a writer revises with this awareness, cuts and expansions begin to feel purposeful rather than punitive.

Over time, writers internalize this feedback. They begin to sense when a scene has said what it can say. They recognize when a sentence is working too hard. They learn to trust white space, summary, and silence. This skill reshapes the way we revise. Instead of asking whether a passage is good or bad, writers ask whether it is the right size. Does this moment deserve this much attention? Does this event need to unfold in real time, or can it be carried in a sentence? 

Importantly, proportion is not universal. Different projects demand a different balance. A novel of psychological interiority will distribute space differently than a novel driven by action. A memoir may linger where fiction would choose tocompress. Manuscript critique with a literary coach helps writers develop proportion that serves their specific aims rather than imitating another writer’s scale.

Learning proportion is a long apprenticeship. It emerges through reading deeply, revising honestly, and engaging with readers who understand craft at a granular level. When writers acquire this skill, their work gains clarity and force. Scenes land with greater precision. Silence becomes expressive. The page begins to reflect not just what happened, but what mattered most.