Michael Cunningham on scale in writing: "I see the passengers before I see the train"

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I don’t work on an epic scale, though my ambitions run more to epic proportions than I like to admit.

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It’s a question of focus. I don’t really see on an epic scale, not in the way of Tolstoy and Morrison and García Márquez.

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I’m wired differently. I see the train before I see the continent it traverses. For that matter, I see the passengers before I see the train. I see the whole as an aggregation of its details. I can’t see it any other way.

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When I was younger, I chastised myself for that. I worried (why pass up any opportunity for worry?) that I was, and would always be, a minor writer.

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I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it anymore. Writing is difficult enough without adding the imperative to evolve into the writer you wish you were.

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It’s helped by the fact that I have, for some time, believed that major versus minor isn’t the most revealing way of distinguishing these books from those books.

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If, for instance, you wanted to learn about late-nineteenth-century Russia, you’d read histories and biographies but you’d also read Chekhov, Turgenev, and others. You’d want to know about the divorce laws that led to Anna Karenina’s decision to go to the opera with Vronsky, and how Akaky Akakievich’s shame about poverty seals his fate in Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”

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Those are all, of course, major writers, but to a degree their significance arises out of their interest in the people who didn’t rule, reign, or command.

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Historians record Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in October 1812, during which at least five hundred thousand French soldiers died of exposure and starvation. Choose a soldier, huddled in the storm, still imagining that he might—might—survive, and get home again. Without fiction, we can’t know any particulars of the home for which he yearns. We wouldn’t know that his father, waiting anxiously, regrets every beating he gave his son, and will do whatever he can to make sure that the boy knows he is loved. We wouldn’t know that the soldier, who’s been undecided about his girlfriend, intends to propose to her almost immediately after he walks through the door.

Writing is difficult enough without adding the imperative to evolve into the writer you wish you were.

The soldier will not survive. We should know about his death, huddled in the snow, under a night sky scattered with stars almost painfully bright. We should know about the ways in which his death changes the lives of his father, his girlfriend, and all the others whose lives were intertwined with his. We should be reminded that every one of the half-million dead soldiers left a void that will never be filled.

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We do imagine those lives, but we know enough about them to trust our own instincts.

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Someone needs to discover new continents. Someone else needs to discover the never-before-seen flora and fauna indigenous to new continents.

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I learned, during my period as a wannabe painter, that your arm and hand move in arcs of different sizes. Your arm may sweep in broad strokes over the surface of a canvas, or you may paint with your hand and wrist. The former painter produces large paintings, the latter produces small ones.

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It’s innate. If you’re a big painter and you try to work small, your paintings are likely to feel claustrophobic. If you’re a small painter and you try to work big, your paintings are likely to feel attenuated, thinned out.

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I’d hate to have to argue that Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is either greater or lesser than Rembrandt’s The Night Watch , although the girl with the earring is a simple portrait of an unknown girl, and The Night Watch is a depiction of a historic event including nineteen figures, a dog, and a chicken (yes, a chicken).

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I’ve realized that I was drawn to Virginia Woolf because she was one of the first writers to insist that there was no such thing as an unimportant life; one of the first to imply that the movements of the galaxies are neither more nor less significant than the movements of subatomic particles. It’s only a question of whether you’re looking through a telescope or a microscope.

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If there are no unimportant lives, then there are only insufficient ways of looking at them. From Emma Bovary to Clarissa Dalloway to Macon Dead, we as readers have been reminded that scale is irrelevant. In the hands of a writer like Woolf, a single day in the life of a society wife can stand beside Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. For Woolf, the lives of “ordinary” people are neither more nor less significant than the lives of world leaders and great artists.

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There’s this, as well.

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I was immediately drawn to Woolf’s insistence on the relativity of human affairs. As she put it, “For [Clarissa] was a child,… and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it! This!’”

We are, writers, readers, and everyone, whether we love our lives or not, compelled to watch time blow it all away. It’s the beauty and tragedy of us. We strive to see the horizon beyond the horizon. We do our work, we fall in love, we make plans and harbor the most extravagant hopes even as we know where it’s all headed.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

I for one am not going to argue with Shakespeare.

Like any writer, I’ve spent my life trying to preserve time, so that others will be able to open a book and not only see but feel that which rises up off the pages; to smell and taste; to hear, if faintly, songs that no one has sung in a century or more.

We persist in the effort, even as we know that almost all our efforts will fail to one degree or another.

It’s like trying to drive a nail into a pool of mercury.

I wish I could tell you why I, we, keep at it. It has something to do with explicating the world to myself by explicating it to others. Different writers do it for different reasons, but I suspect that a romantic relationship to reality is common to all of us. I do it because you, as you read this sentence, are listening to me as I’m trying to listen to you, to imagine you, however distant we are to each other in time and space.

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From the book Unsayable by Michael Cunningham. Copyright © 2026 by Mare Vaporum Corporation. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.