Beehiiv is the new place where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
24th February 2026
A great quote from the American novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, much shared, copiously referenced and endlessly riffed off by blog posters like me:
“The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.“
It’s an alluring proposition, and one that seems to tickle writers’ pickles so much because it feels like the secret flash of revelation which only comes with real genius — the kind of genius we’d like our peers to discern in us. (It certainly makes me catch myself having a bit of Dame Hilda Bracket moment, who would often hear her companion Dr Evadne Hinge come out with some choice witticism, and then wistfully remark, “I wish I’d thought of that, dear…”)
The example Price gives might seem a bit cliché, but melodrama notwithstanding, his point is a valid one, and it really does work. Come to think of it, it’s particularly common in films for the horrors of war to be inflected and intensified by filtering them through the prism of a child’s experience. The girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List; the toy plane in Jim’s hand in Empire of the Sun; pretty much every frame of JoJo Rabbit. Sometimes, an easily reached metaphor can be a valuable one for getting your audience to the place you want them to go with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of clarity.
Allegorical fiction thrives on the power of the BIG/small effect, but it can be a trap, one many writers fall into by aiming for cleverness, and yet only producing coarseness.
One high-risk, high-reward way to wield the full force of that power is through a seemingly antithetical device — the use of intense understatement. George Orwell makes it look effortless in Animal Farm; take this example, the final passages of Chapter Two:
But at this moment the three cows, who had seemed uneasy for some time past, set up a loud lowing. They had not been milked for twenty-four hours, and their udders were almost bursting. After a little thought, the pigs sent for buckets and milked the cows fairly successfully, their trotters being well adapted to this task. Soon there were five buckets of frothing creamy milk at which many of the animals looked with considerable interest.
“What is going to happen to all that milk?” said someone.
“Jones used sometimes to mix some of it in our mash,” said one of the hens.
“Never mind the milk, comrades!” cried Napoleon, placing himself in front of the buckets. “That will be attended to. The harvest is more important. Comrade Snowball will lead the way. I shall follow in a few minutes. Forward, comrades! The hay is waiting.”
So the animals trooped down to the hayfield to begin the harvest, and when they came back in the evening it was noticed that the milk had disappeared.
The bold emphasis is mine, but what’s at stake scarcely needs any emphasising. The physical pressure inside the cows’ overstrained udders is a sumptuous metaphor all of its own for the rising tensions on the farm. It instantly leads to a decisive episode in the progression of Orwell’s story, a crucial milestone moment in the pigs’ journey to domination.
Napoleon’s “Never mind the milk” tells us plainly what’s about to happen; his hearty qualifying addition of “comrades” merely turns the screw of imminent betrayal. The cringe-inducing little sidesteps on his trotters, “placing himself in front of the buckets“, are a beautifully revealing gesture in this context, an unwitting revelation that his tyrannical urges are still not fully formed, not quite yet rooted in complete self-confidence, still clouded by lingering touches of self-consciousness (a cloud which, as we eventually see, won’t take long to dispel.)
Orwell has done enough now. He could have stopped at “The hay is waiting” and we’d get it. The entire final sentence could be dispensed with. But he has the vision and the audacity to keep it in.
The layering of voices from this point on is a thing of real beauty. None of the animals comments on the missing milk, either directly in dialogue, or indirectly through reported speech. The soft anonymous authorial voice is the means of our finding out, as superficially flat as Aesop recounting a fable. But as we know, Aesop was a grand master of the note within the note.
There’s still one last twist of the knife in store for us, that authorial voice switching mid-sentence from the active “and when they came back in theevening” to the archly passive “it was noticed that the milk had disappeared.”
By whom was it noticed? By everyone. By whom was it mentioned? By nobody.
And as Orwell shows, and as the world we now live in routinely confirms, if you let them come for your milk and say nothing, next they will come for your apples, and before you know it, they come for your freedom, your life, and no amount of bleating will stop them.
I’m having great fun with BIG/small in Obsolete Constellations, not least in the contrast between Loncraine and Zafferano’s romance on one hand, and the possible collision of two heavily populated planets on the other. I’ll leave you to decide for yourself which one you think I treat as the BIG and which one I treat as the small.
So, in relation to your own writing, or to your own creative practice — what are the big things your work is currently engaging with, and what are the smallest manageable parts you could concentrate on — and most importantly, what might the effects of that resonance be?